WOODBERRY 


IT 


THE  LIBRARY 
OF 

THE  UNIVERSITY 
OF  CALIFORNIA 

IN  MEMORY  OF 

Professor  Aram  Torossian 


AMERICA   IN   LITERATURE 


BY 


GEORGE  EDWARD  JWOODBERRY 

Professor  of  Comparative  Literature 
Columbia  University 


NEW  YORK  AND  LONDON 

HARPER    6-    BROTHERS    PUBLISHERS 

MCMIII 


Copyright,  1903,  by  HARPER  &  BROTHERS. 

All  eights  reserved. 
Published  November,  1903. 


GIFT 


NOTE 

The  papers  in  this  volume  originally  appeared 
in  Harper's  Magazine  and  in  Harper's  Weekly. 

G.E.W. 
BEVERLY,  MASS.,  Sept.  8,  1903 


174 


CONTENTS 

PAGE 

THE  BEGINNINGS        ...  .3 

THE  KNICKERBOCKER  ERA    .  .40 

THE  LITERARY  AGE  OP  BOSTON  .      .        77 

THE  SOUTH  114 
THE  WEST  .            .                 ....      150 

THE  ACHIEVEMENT                 .      .  .      183 

RESULTS  AND  CONDITIONS     .  205 


AMERICA   IN   LITERATURE 


THE    BEGINNINGS 


EVERYTHING  begins  in  the  mid 
dle—to  adapt  a  wise  saying— like 
an  epic  poem.  That  is  the  central  truth 
of  human  perspective.  Open  history 
where  you  will,  and  there  are  always 
men  streaming  over  the  mountains  or 
the  sea  from  some  horizon,  bringing  with 
them  arms  and  cattle,  battle-songs  and 
prayers,  and  an  imaginary  world;  their 
best  treasure  is  ever  the  seed  of  some 
last  year's  harvest.  Colonialism  is  a 
word  too  often  used  to  disparage  the 
thing;  it  is  the  natural  condition  of  the 
outposts  of  man's  spread  over  the  earth; 
3 


AMERICA    IN    LITERATURE 

the  wave,  as  it  breaks  on  new  shores,  is 
salt  with  time.  England  was  colonized, 
and  Greece  and  India.  So  our  ancestors, 
the  first  Americans,  brought  with  them 
the  past  as  well  as  the  future  to  this  land. 
It  is  not  often  that  books  make  an  im 
portant  item  in  the  cargo  of  an  emigrant 
ship.  The  mother  -  tongue  is  brought, 
and  in  it  is  the  great  sap  of  thought, 
aspiration,  and  resolve  that  shall  feed 
institutions  of  Church  and  State  as  they 
arise;  but  the  book  -  language  is,  in  the 
main,  left  at  home;  it  is  the  mouth- 
language,  where  literature  is  in  the  mak 
ing,  that  will  be  used  on  the  new  soil. 

The  pure  literary  influence  in  all  our 
early  colonies,  the  impact  of  the  book- 
past  of  England,  was  slightest  at  the 
South  and  strengthened  with  the  north 
ing.  In  Virginia,  generally,  the  first 
estates  were  naturally  as  innocent  of 
4 


THE    BEGINNINGS 

learning  as  Osbaldistone  Hall ;  there  was 
a  countrified  indifference  to  it  befitting 
a  young  squirarchy,  a  touch  of  contempt 
felt  with   old-fashioned   English  frank 
ness,  even  a  dull  hatred  of  enlighten 
ment,  as  when  the  Governor  thanked 
God  that  there  were  ' '  no  free  schools  nor 
printing,"    and   hoped  there   would  be 
none  for  a  hundred  years.     "God  keep 
us  from  both!"  he  cried.     At  the  other 
focus  of  the  settlement,  in  New  Eng 
land,  a  different  state  of  affairs  prevailed, 
though  there,  too,  the  pure  literary  in 
fluence  was  narrowly  limited.     But  as 
in  the  dawn  of  England  Beowulf  had 
come   in   the   long   Danish   boats,    and 
many  an  exodus  has  gone  out  with  one 
great  book  which  was  like  brain   and 
blood  to  the  little  race,  there  on  Mas 
sachusetts  Bay  a  book  had  come  with 
the  people;  and  every  ship,  loaded  with 
5 


AMERICA    IN    LITERATURE 

the  twenty  thousand  souls  of  the  first 
emigration,  brought  it — the  book  that 
has  oftenest  crossed  the  sea  of  all  the 
books  of  men  —  the  Bible.  It  is  the 
greatest  English  book,  and  in  this  small 
folk  of  English  stock  it  found  a  human 
vehicle  of  power  equal  to  its  greatness. 
This  nest  of  Puritans  is  commonly 
thought  of  as  deficient  in  that  large  part 
of  the  human  genius  which  is  enlighten 
ed  by  letters, — as  unimaginative;  and 
because  they  did  not  flower  out  with 
polite  literature  they  are  said  to  be  un- 
literary.  Yet  the  Puritan  line  in  Eng 
land  was  constituted  of  Spenser,  Milton, 
and  Bunyan,  the  three  most  imaginative 
minds  of  their  generations  for  a  century 
of  English  life;  though  it  should  be  ob 
served  that  in  these  three  instances  the 
imagination  moved  in  moulds  already 
prepared  for  it.  The  Puritans,  being 
6 


THE    BEGINNINGS 

of  the  stock  they  were,  could  not  but 
be  imaginative,  romantic,  intense,  in  vi 
sion,  emotion,  and  idea;  they  were  high- 
charged  with  all  this  energy;  but  the 
channels  were  prepared  for  it,  and  they 
found  their  literature  in  the  Bible.  If 
they  required  songs  of  praise,  they 
"rolled  the  hymn  to  wintry  skies";  if 
they  sought  expression  for  humiliation, 
or  desired  to  illustrate  their  fortunes  or 
passions,  their  sins,  trials,  and  deliver 
ances,  there  was  the  typical  narrative 
and  drama  of  human  life,  as  they  knew 
it,  in  the  Scriptures;  they  turned  to  their 
one  book,  and  more  frequently,  as  their 
descendants  now  turn  to  whole  libraries, 
and  found  in  it  the  mirror  of  life.  The 
Bible  was,  indeed,  to  use  the  language 
of  to-day,  like  a  great  literary  trust;  it 
*  supplied  all  wants  and  forbade  competi 
tion.  Such  a  book,  when  it  takes  hold  of 
7 


AMERICA    IN    LITERATURE 

a  people  so  completely  and  intimately 
and  fills  the  measure  of  their  spiritual 
energy,  needs  to  recede  before  men  will 
again  attempt  originally  the  task  it  per 
forms,  as  Shakespeare  must  recede  be 
fore  dramatic  imagination  can  flourish 
with  equal  new  power;  for,  though  books 
are  not  seldom  the  seeds  of  revolution,  a 
great  book  is  normally  a  powerful  con 
servative  force,  a  true  bond  of  national 
life. 

It  is,  however,  wide  of  the  mark  to 
describe  a  people  to  whom  the  Old 
Testament  was  more  thoroughly  known 
than  Homer  to  the  young  Greeks  and  the 
New  Testament  more  familiar  than  Vic 
tor  Hugo  to  young  France  as  an  unlit- 
erary  people.  If  it  be  the  function  of 
literature  to  lift  the  thoughts  of  men,  to 
educate  the  emotions,  to  shape  charac 
ter  towards  ideal  ends,  to  exalt  and  to 
8 


THE    BEGINNINGS 

console,  and  always  to  minister  to  the  ( 
spirit  in  its  walk  on  earth,  the  Bible  dis-  . 
charged  this  office  in  the  early  genera 
tion  of  the  New  England  settlements 
with  an  adequacy,  a  constancy,  a  pene 
tration,  a  completeness  of  efficacy  such 
as  is  hardly  to  be  paralleled  in  history. 
It  was  their  rubric  of  prayer,  their  lyric 
of  praise,  the  parable  of  their  morality, 
and  they  adapted  it  to  be  the  epic  of 
their  growing  state  where  they,  too,  were 
a  chosen  people  of  God  planted  in  the 
wilderness.  This  was  its  popular  sig 
nificance. 

It  bred  a  learned  and  scholarly  clergy 
besides,  vast  producers  of  sermons,  con 
troversial  tractates  and  speculative  trea 
tises  in  theology,  such  that,  if  the  book 
had  been  secular,  the  age  would  have 
been  named  Alexandrian ;  and  it  enforced 
that  respect  for  learning  and  the  literary 
9 


AMERICA    IN    LITERATURE 

faculty  which  has  never  ceased  in  that 
region,  as  it  also  made  the  people  a  let 
tered  people  by  the  mere  necessity  that 
it  should  be  read  by  all,  just  as  the  right 
to  vote  is  making  the  nation  at  large  now 
a  lettered  nation.  It  may  seem  like  re 
heating  old  fires  to  discourse  in  this  way 
of  the  place  of  the  Bible  in  our  begin 
nings  ;  but  it  is  essential  for  a  true  com 
prehension  of  our  early  life  and  letters, 
and  the  relationship  between  them,  to 
see  in  these  first  generations  not  a  dull, 
darkened,  unimaginative  folk,  but,  in 
a  true  sense,  one  of  the  most  literary 
states  that  ever  existed,  having  its  most 
passionate  and  intense  life  in  a  book  as 
simple  and  significant  to  it  as  the  Koran 
to  Islam,  and  as  much  richer  than  the 
Koran  in  art  and  truth  as  the  Christian 
life  exceeds  the  Moslem  faith.  To  think 
of  the  old  sermons  and  treatises  as  the 


10 


THE    BEGINNINGS 

first  American  literature  is  like  speaking 
of  the  commentaries  on  Shakespeare  and 
omitting  the  poet.  The  Bible  was  the 
book  in  which  the  first  Americans  found 
what  literature  has  to  give  to  the  hearts 
of  the  people,  and  in  it  they  had  their 
full  and  overflowing  literary,  nor  should 
one  hesitate  to  say  their  artistic  life. 

And  what  was  this  life  that  the  Puri 
tans  led  with  this  book  for  their  brain 
and  heart?  We  have  their  prayers, 
sweet  and  solemn  in  the  cadences  better 
known  to  us  now  in  the  English  Prayer- 
book  ;  we  have  the  letters  of  their  wives, 
like  Mrs.  Winthrop's,  mingling  human 
affection  with  divine  love,  as  if  these 
New  England  mothers  were  also  nuns  of 
Christ's  cloister;  we  have  their  sermons, 
now  terse  and  tense  and  studded  with 
learning  better  known  to  us  in  Milton, 
now  with  the  flowing  amplitude  and  elo- 
ii 


AMERICA    IN    LITERATURE 

quence  that  to  our  ears  is  Taylor's,  or 
with  the  vivid  realism  of  vision  that  to 
our  eyes  is  Bunyan's  limning  on  the 
darkness;  we  have  the  words,  but  the 
light  to  read  them  by  is  gone. 

The  clergy  themselves  are  stiff  to  us 
as  their  portraits — all  wig  and  gown  and 
wooden  smiles — and  when  we  think  of 
them  it  is  most  often  as  fire-breathing 
dragons,  perhaps ;  yet  they  were,  as  is  well 
known,  men  of  great  power  of  character, 
with  some  of  what  seem  the  lost  graces 
of  greatness,  immense  intellectual  vigor, 
moral  authority,  dignity,  the  scholar's 
refinement,  sanctity  even;  and,  if  we  are 
to  judge  by  what  their  friends  said  of 
them  —  and  how  else  shall  we  judge? — 
in  some  few,  at  least,  all  the  poison  of 
human  nature  had  gone  out  of  them  into 
their  creed  and  left  only  angelic  sweet 
ness  in  their  souls ;  nor  is  it  only  in  Pu- 
12 


THE    BEGINNINGS 

ritanism  that  such  a  miracle  has  been 
wrought,  but  it  is  found  in  intense  re 
ligious  life  elsewhere.  The  people  who 
sat  under  their  teaching  are  also  far 
away  in  the  past,  so  marked  in  their 
double  consciousness,  as  it  were;  on  the 
one  side,  absorbed  in  practical  affairs, 
fighting,  exploring,  debating,  building  all 
things  new;  on  the  other,  absorbed  in 
spiritual  self -scrutiny,  despairing,  hop 
ing,  doubting;  so  sure  in  every  touch  on 
this  world  with  axe  and  plough  and  gun, 
yet  within  living  in  the  world  to  come, 
with  the  dreadful  uncertainty  which 
world  it  would  be.  One  sees  the  little 
towns  of  low  houses  dotting  the  coast, 
the  clearings  landward,  the  few  boats  by 
the  shore,  the  deep  woods  all  about,  only 
the  trail  or  the  river  for  roads — a  wilder 
ness  silent  and  dark,  the  summer  heat 
on  the  sparse  corn,  the  winter  drift  over 
13 


AMERICA    IN    LITERATURE 

all;  peril  always  near,  subsistence  often 
uncertain,  a  hard  and  trying  physical 
life.  Yet  here,  as  always  where  life  is 
great,  spiritual  life  was  the  one  reality 
in  the  midst  of  this  stubborn  fact.  We 
cannot  see  clearly  into  that  darkness. 
Perhaps  some  echoes  of  that  life  may 
come  to  us  in  Scott's  Covenanters,  or  in 
the  romance  in  which  Hawthorne  trans 
posed  its  music,  but  it  comes  faintly; 
only  the  imagination  would  be  equal  to 
telling  us,  and  the  secret  is  lost.  The 
heart  of  the  Puritan  is  a  closed  book. 
The  sermons,  the  diaries,  the  por 
traits,  the  so-called  colonial  literature, 
will  not  interpret  it;  they  are  as  much 
in  the  twilight  of  antiquity  as  Anglo- 
Saxon  chronicles  and  riddles;  they  are 
the  grave-clothes  left  behind,  but  the 
spirit,  our  brother  and  master,  is  gone. 
The  silence  that  has  fallen  on  the 
14 


THE    BEGINNINGS 

Puritan  imagination,  meditation,  and 
passion  is,  nevertheless,  not  an  abnor 
mal  thing.  Something  similar  is  always 
happening  in  our  experience.  As  life 
rises  to  expression  in  us,  and  among 
men  at  large  to  whom  literature  is  a 
living  power,  energy  of  thought  and 
emotion  is  draughted  off  through  the  es 
tablished  hereditary  mediums,  through 
Shakespeare,  Scott,  Dickens,  and  leaves 
no  original  trace  of  itself.  The  life  which 
is  led  through  literature — and  it  is  al 
ways  large  in  a  reading  people  such  as 
ours — has  its  superficial  swirl  and  froth 
like  the  ocean,  its  thousand  -  tongued 
clamor  of  books  of  the  hour ;  but  its  deep 
currents  are  silent,  as  the  influence  of 
the  writers  just  named  with  myriads  of 
thousands  of  annual  readers  reminds  us. 
The  Bible  is  still  the  great  Gulf  Stream 
in  the  literary  consciousness  of  English 


AMERICA    IN    LITERATURE 

people,  and  their  life  is  daily  expressed 
through  its  language  and  imagery  and 
ideals,  the  actual  life  of  each  day  from 
matins  to  vespers;  but  it  is  a  life  on 
which,  as  of  old,  silence  falls  at  the  day's 
end.  It  leaves  no  original  record  of  it 
self  in  new  literature,  just  as  the  vitality 
of  impulse,  sympathy,  and  world-hope, 
which  expresses  itself  in  us  by  an  appro 
priation  of  the  genius  of  Burns,  Shelley, 
or  Tennyson  to  our  own  uses,  burns  out 
without  shaping  new  moulds  for  others. 
There  is  an  original  expression  which 
creates  literature  and  is  individualistic; 
but  it  is  rather  in  this  sympathetic  ex 
pression,  which  appropriates  literature 
and  is  social,  that  popular  literary  life 
lies,  and  the  latter  may  flourish  abun 
dantly  when  the  former  seems  dead. 
Such  was  the  case  with  the  Puritan 
genius;  it  used  literature  of  the  highest 
16 


THE    BEGINNINGS 

quality,  but  it  produced  none,  realizing, 
it  is  curious  to  observe,  the  literary  ideal 
of  Plato's  Republic,  where  a  traditional, 
conservative,  and  sacred  poetry  was  to 
reign,  excluding  any  new  individual  ex 
pression. 

The  chief  end  of  literature  as  the  ex 
pression  of  life  being  thus  anticipated 
and  provided  for,  and  the  main  stream 
of  intense  experience,  out  of  which  the 
creative  impulse  comes,  being  directed 
through  these  hereditary  Scriptural 
channels,  there  was  left  for  the  new 
American  speech  only  the  less  essential 
things,  the  fringes  of  this  life  in  its  higher 
spiritual  manifestation,  and  especially 
the  whole  of  the  lower  plane  of  material 
affairs,  the  contemporaneous  record  of 
events,  and,  in  a  word,  the  environment. 

Here,  too,  the  religious  life  sent  its 
rays  from  the  centre  out  into  the  mortal 
17 


AMERICA    IN    LITERATURE 

field.  There  was  an  aura,  for  example,  of 
special  providences  that  filled  the  whole 
heaven  round  the  settlements,  not  with 
the  aloofness  of  miracle,  but  with  a 
homely,  hand-to-mouth  nearness,  so 
that  the  gray  goose  which  John  Dane 
shot  on  Ipswich  River  could  not  fall 
from  the  sky  for  his  dinner  except  as 
the  sparrow  falls.  No  doubt  the  goose 
was  as  real  to  him  as  Elijah's  ravens; 
and  such  a  trifle  best  illustrates  the  om 
nipresent  nearness  of  Providence  in  the 
people's  thought,  as  close  with  the  help 
ing  hand  as  with  the  all-seeing  eye. 
There  was  by  night  another  aura,  too, 
of  darkness  from  the  pit,  that  made  the 
Essex  woods  gloom  and  creak  with  the 
Sabbath  of  witches,  and  gave  Salem  its 
nightmare  year.  The  nearness  of  the 
devil  was  as  natural  as  the  nearness  of 
God ;  and  if  lost  men  in  the  woods  or  orj 
18 


THE    BEGINNINGS 

the  sea  or  on  ice-floes  take  their  hunter's 
luck  as  providential,  as  they  commonly 
do,  it  is  as  instinctive  in  human  nature 
to  feel  in  the  sense  of  peril  in  the  wil 
derness,  in  the  slightness  of  life-shelter 
there,  some  diabolism  in  the  shades. 
But  while  remarkable  providences  and 
witchcraft  delusions  are  the  most  sen 
sational  phases  of  the  record  of  our  early 
annalists  and  diarists,  the  best  part  of  it 
lies  in  its  realistic  story  of  the  life  of  the 
times,  its  anecdotes  of  personal  advent 
ure,  Indian  captivity  and  escape,  ex 
plorations,  voyages  on  the  rivers  and 
coastwise,  the  shipwrecks,  like  that  mar 
vellous  one  of  Thacher  and  Avery,  the 
surprising  deliverances,  all  the  chronicle 
of  pioneer  life. 

Here  the  old  English  speech,  still 
smacking  of  the  times  of  great  Eliza 
beth,  hardens  the  knotty  story  with 


AMERICA   IN    LITERATURE 

rude  oaken  strength,  and  discloses  the 
individual  primitive  force,  the  daring, 
the  resource  and  resolution  of  the  trans 
planted  stock,  v/ith  picturesque  and 
deep-bitten  realism  in  every  scene.  It 
is  primarily  a  literature  of  character 
in  the  raw  state  that  thus  sprang  up, 
with  adventure  as  its  mode  of  presenta 
tion;  it  is  the  stamped  life  of  the  time, 
that  has  proved  more  permanent  because 
it  was  written  down,  but  it  is  only  frag 
ments  of  that  life  whose  living  speech 
was  so  much  more  abundant  and  made 
the  topic  of  secular  interest  round  every 
meeting-house,  in  all  the  taverns,  and  by 
the  great,  blazing  hearths  of  the  whole 
country-side. 

Historians,  in  their  turn,  took  up  the 

tale  and  composed  the  early  annals  of 

the  New  World,  always  with  a  pride  in 

the  land,  and  some  thought  of  it  as  an 

20 


THE    BEGINNINGS 

oasis  of  God  in  His  dealing  with  man 
kind,  a  sense  that  it  was  a  place  of  de 
liverance,  their  very  own,  God's  grant, 
the  King's  realm  rather  by  legal  cour 
tesy  than  of  right;  the  divine  right,  in 
deed,  was  in  themselves,  not  in  the  King. 
The  narrative  itself  is  meagre  and  con 
cerns  simple  things;  but  the  spirit  of  it 
contained  the  political  future.  So,  life 
beginning  now  to  be  long  in  the  land, 
and  the  scattered  settlements  to  multi 
ply  and  knit  together  with  a  broader 
inclusion  of  common  mundane  inter 
ests,  commerce  springing  up  and  spread 
ing  southward  to  the  West  Indies,  and 
wealth  from  home  produce  and  foreign 
exchange  making  rich  citizens  in  the 
principal  towns,  that  movement  of  sec 
ularization  set  in  which  was  the  result  of 
this  growing  diversity  in  employment, 
outlook,  and  ambition,  and  the  world 
21 


AMERICA   IN   LITERATURE 

was  more  and  more,  and  its  problems 
assertive  of  their  privilege  to  be  first  and 
its  ways  of  their  right  to  be  commanding. 
There  was  a  fading-out  of  the  old  fervor, 
a  reactionary  wave  of  the  great  awak 
ening  in  religion,  but  the  lessening  os 
cillations  showed  that  the  element  of 
religion  had  shrunk  again  to  be  only  a 
part  of  life,  and  not  the  leading  public 
part  now.  The  clergy  and  the  magis 
trates  were  less  in  alliance,  as  one  pow 
er  of  the  State,  and  the  former  had  lost 
place.  They  had  left  a  few  memorable 
names  for  landmarks  —  Eliot,  Cotton 
Mather,  Edwards,  among  the  chief — and 
some  folios,  the  Magnalia  the  first;  but 
the  Puritan  age  was  gone,  the  land  was 
settled,  the  main  interest  of  the  people 
was  secular,  questions  of  trade  and  taxes 
came  forward,  and,  foremost  of  all,  the 
question  of  government.  If  literature 
22 


THE    BEGINNINGS 

in  the  first  century  was  mainly  one  that 
came  home  to  men's  bosoms,  it  was  now 
one  that  came  home  to  their  business. 
Perhaps  the  illustrative  moment  of  the 
change  is  best  arrested  in  Franklin's  boy 
hood,  when  he  stayed  at  home  from  even 
ing  meeting  on  the  Sabbath,  not  without 
some  misgiving,  because  he  could  make 
a  better  use  of  his  time  in  study. 

The  founding  of  a  greater  State  than 
the  Puritan  commonwealth  was  now  in 
hand,  and  the  basis  of  it  was  broader  in 
the  roots  of  the  nation  among  the  dis 
persed  colonies.  The  general  complex 
ion  of  the  literature  which  set  forth  the 
growth  of  the  environment  of  the  new 
American  life  was  the  same  in  all  the  col 
onies;  a  similar  record  would  be  made 
later  in  the  winning  of  the  West,  expe 
rience  vividly  felt  being  transcribed  in 
the  words  of  those  who  did  or  closely 
23 


AMERICA   IN   LITERATURE 

observed  the  deeds ;  and  in  these  genera 
tions  of  the  first  conquest  of  the  wilder 
ness,  Colonel  Norwood's  narrative  in  the 
South  was  of  the  same  stripe  as  such 
memorabilia  were  to  be  everywhere. 
Yet  in  the  North,  owing  to  the  greater 
strength  of  the  literary  habit,  a  certain 
primacy  remained  in  importance  and 
fulness.  In  the  new  political  develop 
ment  this  would  no  longer  be  the  case. 
The  great  documents  of  this  literature, 
the  Declaration  and  the  Constitution, 
were  written  to  the  southward,  though 
they  were  the  product  of  the  general 
sense  of  all;  and  round  about  them  the 
writings  of  Jefferson,  Adams,  Madison, 
Paine,  Otis,  and  their  fellows  clustered 
as  a  literature  of  interpretation  of  the 
great  ideas  they  embodied,  in  a  manner 
somewhat  analogous  to  the  way  in  which 
the  sermons  of  the  old  clergy  gath- 
24 


THE    BEGINNINGS 

ered  around  the  Scriptures.  Oratory 
had  sprung  up  in  the  general  forum, 
and  belonged,  like  the  newspapers,  to 
the  troubled  times;  and  having  great 
ideas  to  feed  on,  and  being  electrified  by 
passion,  it  began  that  remarkable  career 
which  had  its  climax  in  Webster  and 
only  died  in  Phillips. 

The  political  literature  of  the  Revolu 
tion  was  the  great  achievement  of  the 
age  in  the  intellectual  sphere;  and  it 
was  so  great  as  it  was  because  from 
the  hour  when  its  immortal  classic,  the 
Declaration,  was  read  by  Washington's 
order  at  the  head  of  every  regiment,  the 
practical  energy  of  the  new-born  nation 
went  into  it  completely,  engaged  in  the 
labor  of  applying  to  life  those  ideas  of 
free  government  which  had  become  the 
absorbing  thought  and  emotion  of  the 
people,  both  in  battle  and  in  council; 
25 


AMERICA   IN    LITERATURE 

and,  moreover,  not  only  were  the  ideas 
themselves  of  commanding  power,  but 
they  were  set  forth  in  words  and  bodied 
forth  in  institutions  by  great  characters. 
Washington's  Farewell  Address  is  rightly 
reckoned  a  monument  of  the  time  scarce 
ly  inferior  in  dignity  to  the  two  instru 
ments  that  preceded  it;  and  one  great 
book  of  government,  The  Federalist, 
summed  up  the  broad  national  thought. 
In  these  writings,  distinctively,  was 
the  literary  outburst  of  life,  as  it  then 
sought  expression  in  language,  imagery, 
and  ideas  of  public  liberty,  as  directly, 
pervasively,  and  energetically  as  in  the 
Puritan  commonwealth  in  the  earlier  age 
it  had  found  utterance  in  the  language 
and  imagery  and  ideals  of  the  Bible;  it 
was  here  as  thoroughly  political  as  it  had 
before  been  religious;  but  here,  too,  it  is 
life  expressed  in  literature,  though  now 
26 


THE    BEGINNINGS 

the  form  is  original  and  indigenous. 
The  first  great  contact  of  life  and  letters 
in  America  was  through  religious  passion 
in  inherited  forms  of  speech ;  the  second 
great  contact  was  through  political  pas 
sion,  and  created  a  new  literature  for 
itself;  between  the  two  lay  the  litera 
ture,  always  more  or  less  in  evidence,  de 
scribing  the  environment  of  life  and  its 
events  realistically,  or  summing  it  up  in 
history  or  annals.  Such,  in  few  words, 
is  the  story  of  the  interaction  of  Amer 
ican  life  and  letters  in  their  vital  con 
nection  in  the  colonial  times. 

Is  it  too  brief  a  tale,  too  scant  in 
names  and  titles,  too  little  diversified? 
Does  it  slight  academic  definitions,  pre 
conceptions  of  the  bibliographer  and  an 
tiquarian,  the  received  tradition  of  our 
colonial  literature  which  has  so  swelled 
in  bulk  by  the  labors  of  our  literary  his- 
27 


AMERICA    IN   LITERATURE 

torians  in  the  last  thirty  years  of  local 
research?     What  of  The  Day  of  Doom, 
The   New   England   Primer,  and   Poor 
Richard's    Almanack,    and    the    other 
wooden   worthies   of  our   Noah's  Ark, 
survivors  from  the  Flood,  archaic  idols? 
These  are  relics  of  a  literary  fetichism, 
together  with  Franklin's  Autobiography 
and  Edwards's  On  the  Freedom  of  the 
Will,  except   that   the  great  character 
of  Franklin  still  pleads  for  one,  and  the 
great  intellect  of  Edwards  for  the  other 
with  a  few.     They  do  not  belong  with 
the  books  that  become  the  classics  of 
a  nation.     They  are  not  necessarily  re 
membered.     Their  being  mentioned  at 
all  denotes  the  scarcity  of  colonial  books 
that  can  be  brought,  even  by  charity, 
under  the  head  of  literature  in  its  polite 
sense. 

The  contact  of  the  colonists  with  ele- 
28 


THE    BEGINNINGS 

gant  letters,  as  imported  from  England, 
was  also  inconspicuous.  It  is  true  that 
William  Hathorne,  the  ancestor  of  the 
romancer,  brought  over  Sir  Philip  Sid 
ney's  Arcadia,  and  the  thought  of  that 
stern  captain  and  orator  of  the  Puri 
tan  assembly  reading  the  lore  of  the 
shepherd  -  knights,  of  love  in  the  far 
different  wild  of  Salem,  fills  one  with 
amazement;  but  the  fact  is  significant 
of  the  kind  of  touch  with  England  then 
maintained,  and  not  through  the  schol 
ars  of  the  old-home  Cambridge  alone. 
Spenser  was  also  known,  and  Du  Bartas; 
and,  as  time  went  on,  the  Puritan  litera 
ture  came  over — Milton  and  Bunyan,  and 
then  Cowper,  the  characteristic  books 
to  be  found  in  New  England  homes  at 
the  end  of  the  period,  and  long  after 
wards  the  familiar  books  of  the  house 
there.  But  those  who  felt  the  literary 
29 


AMERICA    IN    LITERATURE 

impulse  from  the  imported  writings  were 
few  and  achieved  nothing;  gather  up 
their  slender  compositions  as  we  may 
with  pious  care,  it  is  only  for  reburial. 
The  fertilizing  power  of  such  books  was 
long  delayed,  so  long,  in  fact,  as  to  bring 
the  eighteenth  century  nearer  to  us  than 
it  is  to  Englishmen;  for  Addison,  who 
first  was  felt  in  Irving,  is  still  percepti 
ble  in  Curtis,  and  Holmes  hardly  escaped 
being  one  of  Pope's  imitators.  It  is  only 
one  hidebound  in  academic  prejudice 
who  could  treat  such  a  rill  of  Parnassus 
as  imitative  colonial  verse,  as  a  matter 
of  any  importance  in  our  literature. 
The  people  were  a  prose  people,  who  had 
both  their  practical  and  spiritual  life  in 
prose;  what  was  to  them  the  substance 
of  poetry  in  their  lives  was  clothed  in 
prose,  however  exalted  with  the  rhythm 
of  deep,  natural  feeling ;  their  very  hymns 
30 


THE    BEGINNINGS 

had  lost  the  sense  of  poetic  form.  They 
had,  in  truth,  forgotten  poetry;  the 
perception  of  it  as  a  noble  and  exquisite 
form  of  language  had  gone  from  them, 
nor  did  it  come  back  till  Bryant  recap 
tured,  for  the  first  time,  its  grander 
lines  at  the  same  time  that  he  gave  land 
scape  to  the  virgin  horizons  of  his  coun 
try. 

Slowly,  however,  the  ground  was  pre 
pared  for  literature  in  the  narrower 
sense;  it  was  the  last  of  the  great  natural 
functions  of  a  civilized  State  to  revive 
on  the  new  soil;  even  now  it  is  only  with 
reservations  that  it  can  be  said  to  have 
reached 'the  dignity  of  a  distinct  pro 
fession  among  us.  The  clergy  and  the 
statesmen  used  it  only  as  a  tool  in  their 
own  crafts  for  ulterior  ends;  they  did 
not  value  it  as  an  art  capable  of  products 
that  belong  only  to  itself.  There  was 
31 


AMERICA   IN   LITERATURE 

no  place  for  the  man  of  letters  in  the 
social  arrangement ;  there  was  no  market 
for  his  wares  in  the  social  economy;  re 
ligious  and  political  ideals  were  supplied 
in  abundance,  and  no  need  was  felt  for 
other  ideals;  and,  as  for  entertainment, 
it  was  a  hard-working  world,  this  young 
America,  fully  employed  with  its  mate 
rial  tasks  in  subduing  the  soil,  advancing 
the  border,  establishing  trade,  manufact 
ure,  and  commerce,  founding  institu 
tions,  planting  the  State  in  all  ways. 
Communication  spread  through  the  col 
onies,  which  drew  together,  but  this 
communication  was  ecclesiastical,  mer 
cantile,  political;  and,  in  fact,  it  was 
scientific  before  it  was  literary.  The 
first  class,  too,  that  developed  wealth 
was  a  burgher  commercial  class,  whose 
indulgence  was  in  articles  of  costly  mer 
chandise,  in  luxuries  of  the  house  and 
32 


THE    BEGINNINGS 

dress,  in  comfortable  living;  the  old 
Tory  class,  materialized  with  new  riches 
and  interested  in  the  old  order  as  one  in 
which  they  were  substantial  citizens. 
Letters  have  seldom  flourished  in  such 
an  environment.  It  was  not  until  the 
prosperous  times  after  the  Revolution, 
in  a  wider  and  more  varied  world,  that 
signs  of  literary  consciousness  can  be 
discerned.  In  the  newspapers  there  be 
gan  to  be  indications  of  literary  ambi 
tion,  and  in  the  publications  that  were 
late  fruits  of  the  periodical  movement 
in  the  English  eighteenth  century  there 
were  signs  of  literary  breeding,  but  the 
minds  of  the  contributors  fed  on  the 
husks  of  a  foreign  taste.  The  presses  of 
Philadelphia  and  Wilmington  had  re 
printed  English  books,  and  English  rad 
icalism  was  early  welcomed  and  had 
a  living  contemporary  impetus;  Mary 
3  33 


AMERICA   IN   LITERATURE 

Wollstonecraft's    books,    for    example, 
were  issued  and  had  influence. 

There  was  a  rapid  expansion  in  the 
field  of  books ;  readers  increased  in  num 
bers;  a  demand  arose  for  works  current 
in  the  mother  -  country,  as  well  as  for 
standard  authors  of  the  closing  century. 
Perhaps  the  clearest  sign  of  the  coming 
revival  was  to  be  seen  in  the  first  pub 
lic  libraries,  called  social  libraries,  that 
sprang  up  in  the  New  England  coast 
towns  and  were  considerable  collections 
for  general  use.  Their  catalogues  show 
what  books  were  read;  and,  while  they 
contain  a  large  proportion  of  religious 
works,  manuals  of  counsel  for  parents 
and  youth,  serious  meditative  discourses, 
and  the  like,  they  are  also  filled  with 
travel,  history,  the  science  of  those  days, 
the  English  classic  poets  and  prose 
writers,  and  are  not  destitute  of  fiction 
34 


THE   BEGINNINGS 

and  plays.  They  reveal  the  existence  of 
a  distinct  literary  attention  in  the  com 
munity,  which  was  in  readiness  for  the 
native  writers;  or,  if  they  failed  to  arise, 
these  little  libraries  would  breed  them. 
What  was  true  of  the  neighborhood  of 
Boston  was  also  the  case  in  other  local 
centres  as  far  south  as  Philadelphia  at 
least;  the  reading  public,  interested  in 
contemporary  books  and  also  familiar 
ized  with  the  traditional  higher  forms  of 
the  literary  art — essay,  tale,  and  poem — 
had  come. 

The  first  appearance  of  an  American 
spirit,  indigenous  and  of  the  soil,  would 
naturally  be  found  in  that  folk-litera 
ture  that  comes  with  printer's  ink  instead 
of  with  the  bardic  harp,  the  broad 
side  of  ballad  and  news ;  but  of  this  there 
was  only  a  small  product,  chiefly  re 
membered  by  the  Song  of  Braddock's 
35 


AMERICA    IN    LITERATURE 

Men,  the  ballad  of  Nathan  Hale,  Yan 
kee  Doodle,  and  the  like;  and  no  popu 
lar  writer  rose  out  of  it.  The  first  name 
distinctly  literary  was  that  of  Philip 
Freneau,  whose  poems,  though  following 
the  manner  of  the  contemporary  Eng 
lish  school,  had  American  color  in  their 
subjects;  while  he  possessed  literary 
feeling,  he  had  no  distinction  except  as 
a  solitary  figure,  and  he  made  no  wide 
appeal  to  his  countrymen.  Charles 
Brockden  Brown,  the  earliest  American 
novelist,  was  of  a  much  stronger  native 
fibre.  He  had  an  original  impulse, 
springing  from  his  times  and  his  environ 
ment,  and  his  novels  were  localized  on 
the  soil.  In  manner  he,  too,  adopted 
the  current  English  fashion,  and  yet  not 
slavishly,  but  with  a  purpose  to  reform 
and  advance  it,  and  put  it  to  new  uses. 
He  made  a  conscious  attempt  to  substi- 
36 


THE    BEGINNINGS 

tute  realism  for  romantic  supernatural- 
ism,  and  turned  from  the  Gothic  castle 
and  the  ghost  to  quasi  -  scientific  phe 
nomena,  such  as  ventriloquism,  som 
nambulism,  and  clairvoyance,  for  the 
magic  of  his  mystery,  and  to  the  con 
temporary  things  of  America,  such  as 
the  Indian  and  the  yellow -fever  pest 
in  New  York,  for  the  substance  of  his 
physical  background.  He  remained, 
however,  too  closely  attached  to  the 
pseudo-romantic  in  character,  and  was 
too  much  interested  in  the  ideas  of  God 
win's  English  radicalism,  to  be  able  to 
break  out  a  plain  human  story  from 
the  shell  of  life  in  the  colonies,  as  Miss 
Edgeworth  did  in  the  case  of  Irish  and 
Scott  in  the  case  of  Scotch  life.  He  was 
far  from  being  a  genius  in  fiction;  but 
American  traits,  things,  and  contem 
porary  interests  are  strongly  marked  in 
37 


AMERICA   IN   LITERATURE 

his  curiously  composite  tales;  the  fer 
ment  of  new  literary  life  is  in  them.  In 
the  elder  Richard  Henry  Dana,  who  held 
a  similar  position  in  the  New  England 
centre,  poetry  and  fiction  were  blended, 
but  neither  element  disclosed  Ameri 
can  originality  except  by  some  modifica 
tion  of  his  English  exemplars  in  respect 
to  the  setting  of  his  works.  The  char 
acter,  the  passion,  the  situation  are  still 
of  the  pseudo-romantic  English  school, 
which  was  the  tap-root  of  Byronism  and 
in  Dana  sent  out  a  wandering  shoot  over 
sea.  But  Freneau,  Brown,  and  Dana, 
though  their  works  are  long  forgotten, 
illustrate  the  sort  of  literary  creation 
that  went  on  in  the  opening  of  the 
New  World  to  the  poetic  and  ro 
mantic  imagination  of  its  own  sons. 
They  were  pioneers  of  the  literary 
art  and  profession,  with  habits  Eng- 

38 


THE    BEGINNINGS 

lish-bred,  but   working    in    the    home 
field. 

These  were  our  beginnings  in  the  life 
which  a  people  leads  through  books, 
those  works  which  it  inherits  from  the 
fathers  and  those  which  it  creates  out  of 
itself.  This  life  lay  almost  exclusively  in 
the  religious,  political,  and  historic  fields; 
it  was  only  with  the  generation  born 
after  the  Revolution  that  literature  was 
practised  as  a  fine  art  in  an  independent 
and  original  way.  But  the  colonial  gen 
erations  had  done  their  work,  and  the 
time  was  ripe  for  complete  life  on  the 
scale  of  Western  civilization.  They  had 
planted  religion,  liberty,  and  letters, 
which  are  the  three  estates  of  a  great 
nation;  and  literature  had  been  their 
instrument  in  each  phase  of  the  triple 
task. 


THE    KNICKERBOCKER    ERA 


T^ATHER  KNICKERBOCKER  was 
1  the  first  literary  creation  of  our 
country.  The  little  old  man  in  the  old 
black  coat  and  cocked  hat,  who  strayed 
from  his  lodgings  and  was  near  being 
advertised  for  by  the  police  of  that  day, 
and  who  left  behind  him  the  curious  his 
tory  that  was  to  be  sold  for  his  debts, 
was  destined  by  the  spirit  of  humor  to 
be  the  eldest  child  of  our  originality,  and 
he  proved  his  title-deeds  of  true  birth  so 
well  that  the  estate  of  New  York  proud 
ly  received  and  owned  him  and  gave 
him  the  island  and  river  realm  and  took 
40 


THE    KNICKERBOCKER    ERA 

to  itself  and  its  belongings  the  name 
of  its  droll  saint.  He  was  a  myth,  like 
all  our  types;  for  American  genius  has 
never  yet  created  a  man  or  woman  so 
much  of  nature's  stamp  as  to  live  in  our 
memories  and  affections  like  one  of  our 
selves,  as  Uncle  Toby  or  Hamlet  or  Pick 
wick  does;  but,  like  all  true  myths,  he 
had  a  root  in  the  soil.  It  was  charac 
teristically  American,  premonitory  of  a 
land  of  many  races,  that  this  Dutch  gro 
tesque,  so  pure  in  his  racial  strain  as  to 
incorporate  all  the  old  traditional  blood 
in  his  small  figure,  should  have  issued 
from  a  brain  half  Scotch  and  half  Eng 
lish,  the  first-born  of  Irving's  invention; 
but  Dietrich  Knickerbocker  could  hard 
ly  have  seen  himself  with  Dutch  eyes, 
and  so  in  this  first  instance  it  was 
the  blending  of  the  stocks  that  gave 
literary  consciousness  and  set  up  the 


AMERICA    IN    LITERATURE 

reactions  that   breed   imagination   and 
humor. 

The  city,  nevertheless,  was  pure-blood 
ed  in  these  early  days,  at  least  by  com 
parison  with  its  later  conglomerations; 
and  it  was,  in  fact,  the  expression  of  lo 
cal  pride  and  race  dignity  in  Dr.  Mitchell's 
Picture  of  New  York  that  gave  occasion 
to  the  graceless  half  -  breed,  this  young 
Irving,  to  amuse  himself  and  the  town 
with  its  author's  vanity  and  heaviness. 
The  Knickerbocker  History  was  the  sort 
of  broad  travesty  that  the  victim  calls 
coarse  caricature,  and  it  might  not  have 
survived  so  long  and  so  acceptably  if  the 
victorious  English  race  had  not  grown 
with  the  city  and  continued  the  local 
temper  that  most  enjoyed  the  humor. 
Certainly  the  old  Dutch  town  cannot  be 
credited  with  producing  Irving,  except 
on  the  theory  of  opposites ;  it  furnished 
42 


THE    KNICKERBOCKER    ERA 

the  material,  but  the  hand  that  wrought 
it  was  English  by  blood  and  breeding. 
It  belonged  to  the  situation  that  the  ob 
server  should  be  of  a  different  kind;  the 
subject  gained  by  his  aloofness  from  it. 
If  one  to  the  manner  born  could  never 
have  seen  the  broad  humor  of  it,  neither 
could  he  have  touched  the  Knicker 
bocker  world  with  that  luminous  senti 
ment  which  by  another  smile  of  fortune 
made  Rip  Van  Winkle  immortal.  In 
dividuality  has  played  an  uncommonly 
large  part  in  our  literature,  and  its  part 
is  always  greater  than  is  usually  allowed ; 
and,  after  all,  Irving  created  this  past; 
he  was  the  medium  through  whom  it 
became  visible ;  and  it  still  lies  there  in 
the  atmosphere  of  his  genius  not  in  the 
crudity  of  its  own  by-gone  fact.  He 
found  the  old  Dutch  life  there  in  the  city 
and  up  and  down  the  waterways  in  his 
43 


AMERICA    IN   LITERATURE 

cheerful,  tender,  and  warm  youth;  he 
laughed  at  it  and  smiled  on  it ;  and  what 
it  was  to  his  imagination  it  came  to  be 
as  reality  almost  historic  to  his  country 
men. 

It  is  all  a  colonial  dream,  like  Long 
fellow's  Acadie,  and  the  witchery  of 
literature  has  changed  it  into  an  hori 
zon  of  our  past,  where  it  broods  forever 
over  the  reaches  of  the  Hudson  north 
ward.  Hawthorne's  Puritan  past  is  not 
more  evasive;  but  a  broad  difference  is 
marked  by  the  contrast  of  The  Scarlet 
Letter  and  The  Legend  of  Sleepy  Hol 
low;  the  absence  of  the  moral  element  is 
felt  in  the  latter;  and  a  grosser  habit  of 
life,  creature  comfort,  a  harmless  but  un- 
spiritual  superstition,  a  human  warmth, 
a  social  comradery,  are  prominent  in 
Irving's  lucubrations,  and  these  are 
traits  of  the  community  ripened  and 
44 


THE    KNICKERBOCKER   ERA 

sweetened  in  him.  Irving  must  have 
been  a  charming  boy,  and  in  his  young 
days  he  laid  the  bases  of  his  life  in  good 
cheer,  happy  cordiality,  the  amiableness 
of  a  sensitive  and  pleasurable  tempera 
ment,  which  he  developed  in  the  kindly 
and  hospitable  homes  of  the  city.  He 
was  all  his  days  a  social  creature,  and 
loved  society,  masculine  and  feminine; 
and  going  from  New  York  to  a  long  Eu 
ropean  experience  of  social  life  he  re 
turned  to  be  one  of  the  finest  types  of  a 
man  so  bred,  fit  to  be  one  of  the  historic 
literary  figures  of  a  commercial  and  cos 
mopolitan  city. 

Irving,  however,  thorough  American 
of  his  day  though  he  was,  bore  but  little 
relation  to  the  life  of  the  nation.  He 
was  indebted  to  his  country  for  some 
impulses  of  his  genius  and  much  mate 
rial  which  he  reworked  into  books;  but 
45 


AMERICA   IN   LITERATURE 

he  gave  more  than  he  received.  Our 
early  literary  poverty  is  illustrated  by 
the  gifts  he  brought.  He  was  a  pioneer 
of  letters,  but  our  literary  pioneers  in 
stead  of  penetrating  further  into  the 
virgin  wilderness  had  to  hark  back  to 
the  old  lands  and  come  again  with  pirat 
ical  treasures;  and  in  this  he  was  only 
the  first  of  a  long  line  of  continental 
adventurers.  Much  of  American  literary 
experience,  which  comes  to  us  in  our  few 
classics,  was  gained  on  foreign  soil;  and, 
in  fact,  it  must  be  acknowledged  that, 
like  some  young  wines,  American  genius 
has  been  much  improved  by  crossing 
the  seas.  Irving  was  the  first  example. 
Commerce  naturally  leads  to  travel,  and 
he  went  out  as  a  man  in  trade  to  stay 
a  few  months.  He  remained  seventeen 
years.  It  was  not  merely  that  he  re 
ceived  there  an  aristocratic  social  train- 
46 


THE    KNICKERBOCKER    ERA 

ing  and  opportunity  peculiarly  adapted 
to  ripen  his  graces — and  the  graces  of 
his  style  and  nature  are  essentially  so 
cial  graces — but  subjects  were  given  to 
him  and  his  sympathies  drawn  out  and 
loosed  by  both  his  English  and  his  Span 
ish  residences. 

Sentiment  and  romance  were  more  to 
him  than  humor,  and  grew  to  be  more 
with  years;  and  in  the  old  lands  his 
mind  found  that  to  cling  to  and  clamber 
over  which  otherwise  might  not  have 
come  to  support  his  wandering  and  sym 
pathetic  mood.  Genius  he  had,  the  nat 
ure  and  the  faculty  of  an  imaginative 
writer;  what  he  needed  was  not  power 
but  opportunity;  and  at  every  new 
chance  of  life  he  answered  to  the  time 
and  place  and  succeeded.  He  alone  of 
men  not  English-born  has  added  fasci 
nation  to  English  shrines,  and  given 
47 


AMERICA    IN    LITERATURE 

them  that  new  light  that  the  poet 
brings;  and  he  has  linked  his  name  in- 
dissolubly  for  all  English -reading  peo 
ple  with  the  Alhambra  and  Granada. 
It  was  because  of  his  American  birth 
that  he  wrote  of  Columbus,  and  perhaps 
some  subtle  imaginative  sympathy  al 
ways  underlies  the  attraction  of  Spain, 
which  is  so  marked,  for  American  writ 
ers;  but  it  was  not  unfitting  that  in  his 
volumes  of  travel  sketches  the  romantic 
after-glow  of  Spain  should  bloom  in  our 
western  sky.  By  such  works,  more  than 
by  his  English  sketches,  which  will  al 
ways  seem  an  undivided  part  of  English 
literature,  he  gave  to  our  early  litera 
ture  a  romantic  horizon,  though  found 
in  the  history  and  legend  of  a  far  coun 
try,  which  it  had  hitherto  lacked;  and  it 
is  a  striking  phenomenon  to  find  our 
writers,  on  whom  the  skies  shut  down 
48 


THE    KNICKERBOCKER   ERA 

round  the  shores  of  the  New  World,  lifting 
up  and  opening  out  these  prospects  into 
the  picturesque  distance  of  earth's  space 
and  the  romantic  remoteness  of  history, 
as  if  our  literary  genius  were  gone  on  a 
voyage  of  discovery.  It  shows  the  ex 
pansion  of  the  national  mind,  the  cessa 
tion  of  the  exiguous  exile  of  the  colonial 
days,  the  beginning  of  our  reunion  with 
the  nations  of  the  world,  which  still 
goes  on;  and  in  this  reunion,  necessary 
for  our  oneness  with  man,  literature  led 
the  way  in  these  romantic  affections  of 
our  first  travelled  man  of  letters,  Irving, 
in  whose  wake  the  others  followed. 

The  third  point  of  contact  that  Ir- 
ving's  genius  found  with  the  larger  life 
of  his  native  land  was  in  the  realm  of 
exploration.  It  was  long  now  since  the 
human  tide  had  swept  from  the  shores 
and  inlets  of  the  sea  through  the  great 
4  49 


AMERICA    IN    LITERATURE 

forests  and  down  the  Appalachian  slopes 
and  broken  in  broad  streams  upon  the 
open  prairie;  and  the  adventurers  were 
already  threading  the  thin  trails  of  the 
desert  and  high  mountain  solitudes. 
Here  was  the  new  and  unused  material 
of  national  experience,  and  to  this  day 
its  riches  have  gone  to  waste,  so  far  as 
literature  is  concerned.  Irving,  how 
ever,  on  his  late  return  home,  was  struck 
with  admiration  at  the  vast  progress 
made  into  the  Western  wilderness,  and 
he  perceived  its  literary  utility.  A  jour 
ney  he  made  in  the  Southwest  gave  him 
the  near  view  he  always  needed  to  stim 
ulate  his  descriptive  power  and  to  wake 
!  his  eye  for  incident,  and  in  his  Tour  of 
the  Prairies  he  wrote  down  our  best  lit 
erary  impression  of  the  actual  scene.  It 
was  no  more  than  a  traveller's  journal, 
but  it  remains  unique  and  interesting. 


THE    KNICKERBOCKER    ERA 

Unfortunately  his  temperament  was  not 
such  as  to  respond  with  creative  power 
over  this  new  world.  The  theme  did 
not  pass  beyond  the  realistic  stage  of 
treatment,  just  as  in  the  case  of  Poe, 
who  also  saw  the  subject  in  his  Julius 
Rodman,  though  Irving's  handling  far 
surpasses  Poe's  by  virtue  of  his  person 
ality  and  the  charm  that  radiates  from 
it.  Even  less  in  Astoria  and  Captain 
Bonneville  did  Irving  win  the  heart  from 
this  Western  mystery.  The  matter  re 
mained  crude,  fine  in  its  facts,  but  un 
imaginative,  unwakened,  unbreathed  on 
by  the  spirit  that  giveth  life.  The  Amer 
icanization  of  the  wilderness  was  going 
on,  but  its  literature  was  like  that  of 
the  settlement  of  the  coast  in  the  earlier 
time,  a  mass  of  contemporary,  rudely 
recorded  experience  and  memory;  the 
routes  of  the  fur-traders  still  led  only 
51 


AMERICA    IN   LITERATURE 

to  and  from  the  Astor  counting-room; 
Irving  observed  and  noted,  and  made  a 
book  or  two  of  the  discovery,  but  his 
imagination  was  not  of  the  sort  to  draw 
out  the  romance  of  it,  for  it  had  no  ele 
ment  of  the  past,  and  the  past  was  his 
mother  Muse. 

It  was  the  second  writer  who  sprang 
up  in  the  old  city  of  New  York,  Cooper, 
who  was  to  create  in  this  broad  field  of 
national  expansion,  though  in  narrow 
ly  limited  ways  far  from  adequate  to 
the  vast  sweep  and  variety  of  its  im 
mensely  efficient  life.  Cooper  subdued 
for  literature  the  forest  and  the  sea  and 
brought  them  into  the  mind's  domain, 
but  it  was  rather  as  parts  of  nature  than 
as  the  theatre  of  men.  The  power  of 
the  scenery  is  most  felt  in  his  work  and 
prevails  over  the  human  element.  It 
is  a  just  perspective,  nevertheless,  and 
52 


THE    KNICKERBOCKER   ERA 

true  to  the  emotion  of  the  time  and 
place. 

He  began  very  naturally.  His  first 
interest  was  in  character,  the  person 
ality  that  he  immortalized  as  Harvey 
Birch,  and  in  the  events  so  near  in  mem 
ory  to  him  and  so  close  in  locality,  the 
Revolutionary  scene  as  it  was  in  West- 
chest  er;  and  out  of  these  he  made  a  his 
torical  tale  that  was  the  corner-stone  of 
a  great  literary  reputation.  But  it  was 
not  long  before  he  went  deeper  into  the 
sources  of  his  own  experience  for  theme 
and  feeling,  and  his  most  characteristic 
work  was  a  part  of  himself,  of  that  self 
which  had  shared  most  widely  in  the 
novel  and  broad  experience  of  American 
life.  He  had  grown  up  under  the  shad 
ow  of  the  wild  forest  and  in  the  sunlight 
of  the  lake  and  clearing,  in  close  contact 
with  nature  all  his  boyish  days;  famil- 
53 


AMERICA   IN    LITERATURE 

iarity  with  the  forest  gave  him  at  a  later 
time  of  youth  the  open  secret  of  the  sea, 
so  much  the  same  are  the  ground  tones 
of  nature;  and  ceasing  to  be  midship 
man  and  lieutenant,  he  had,  so  to  speak, 
made  the  rounds  of  the  great  elements 
in  whose  primitive  simplicities  he  set  his 
story.  There  was  something  of  the  art 
ist  in  him,  but  nothing  of  the  poet,  and 
he  felt  the  impressiveness  of  nature,  its 
oppositions  to  society  and  law  and  man, 
as  our  common  humanity  feels  them, 
not  in  Wordsworthian  aloofness  and 
spiritual  interpretation,  but  as  a  real 
presence,  an  actuality,  a  thing  of  fact. 
His  popular  vogue  in  France  was  pre 
pared  for  him  by  a  pre-established  har 
mony  between  the  eloquent  French 
dream  of  the  life  of  nature  and  his  narra 
tive  where  nature  still  brooded  as  in  a 
lake,  so  near  was  he  to  her  presence;  but 
54 


THE    KNICKERBOCKER    ERA 

what  was  to  the  foreigner  a  new  Arcadia 
only,  an  illusion  of  the  heart,  was  to  him 
a  living  world. 

Being  a  novelist,  he  concentrated  this 
vague  emotion  of  the  free  majesty  of 
nature  in  a  character  of  fiction,  Leather- 
stocking,  one  of  the  great,  original  types 
of  romanticism  in  the  past  century.  Yet 
Leatherstocking,  like  Knickerbocker,  is 
pure  myth,  with  a  root  in  the  soil,  too, 
an  incarnation  of  the  forest  -  border,  a 
blend  of  nature  and  man  in  a  human 
form,  thoroughly  vitalized,  impressive, 
emotional,  an  ideal  figure.  It  is  char 
acteristic  of  our  greater  writers,  even 
our  humorists,  to  be  nearer  to  the  Amer 
ican  idea  than  to  anything  concretely 
American.  The  infusion  of  grandeur — 
the  word  is  not  inappropriate — in  Coo 
per's  work  is  what  gives  it  distinction, 
and  most  in  its  most  imaginative  por- 
55 


AMERICA    IN    LITERATURE 

tions.  It  is  true  that  he  invented  the 
sea-novel,  as  was  not  unnatural,  in  view 
of  his  experience  of  our  maritime  life 
and  of  the  great  place  of  that  life  in 
our  national  activity  and  consciousness ; 
and  he  used  colonial,  revolutionary,  and 
border  history  out  of  our  stores  to  weave 
incident,  plot,  and  scene;  but  it  is  not 
these  things  that  make  him  national, 
but  the  American  breath  that  fills  his 
works ;  and  where  this  is  least  the  scene 
grows  mean,  petty,  awkward,  inept, 
feeble;  and  where  it  is  greatest  there 
the  life  is  found  —  in  The  Pathfinder, 
The  Deerslayer,  The  Prairie.  He  was 
abroad,  like  Irving,  for  many  years, 
and  gained  thereby  —  perhaps  through 
contrast  and  detachment  merely  —  a 
truer  conception  and  deeper  admiration 
of  democracy,  its  principles,  aims,  and 
energies;  but  he  was  national  where  Ir- 

56 


THE    KNICKERBOCKER   ERA 

ving  was  international,  and  if  Irving, 
in  his  literary  relation  to  his  country,  is 
rather  thought  of  as  an  influence  upon  it, 
Cooper  was  its  effluence,  the  American 
spirit  in  forest,  sea,  and  man  taking  on 
form,  feature,  and  emotion  first  in  his 
world,  sentimentalized,  idealized,  picto 
rial  though  it  was.  The  best  that  litera 
ture  achieves  is  a  new  dream;  this  was 
the  first  dream  of  American  life,  broad 
and  various,  in  its  great  new  solitudes  of 
sea  and  land. 

Irving  and  Cooper  were  the  two  writ 
ers  of  the  first  rank  in  our  letters. 
Strangely  contrasted  in  their  careers  as 
well  as  in  character,  and  curiously  over 
lapping  in  their  experience  and  writings, 
neither  of  them  was  a  true  product  of  the 
city,  or  bound  to  it,  except  in  ephemeral 
ways.  The  one  beloved,  the  other  hated, 
their  reputations  were  alike  national. 
57 


AMERICA   IN    LITERATURE 

American  literature,  which  was  in  no 
sense  provincial,  began  with  them.  A 
third  great  name,  which  is  as  large  in 
tradition,  at  least,  is  linked  with  theirs 
in  the  city's  literary  fame.  Bryant  was 
a  New  -  Englander  by  birth,  and  re 
mained  one  in  nature  all  his  life,  but  his 
name  lingers  where  he  had  his  career,  in 
the  metropolis.  It  belongs  to  a  city  in 
which  of  all  the  cities  of  the  earth  na 
tivity  is  the  least  seal  of  citizenship  to 
appropriate  justly  the  works  of  its  fos 
ter-children ;  and  Bryant  illustrates,  as  a 
New-Yorker,  its  assimilation  of  the  sons 
of  all  the  nation.  In  the  Niagara  of  life 
that  forever  pours  into  its  vast  human 
basin,  there  has  been  a  constant  current 
from  New  England,  important  in  the 
city's  life  and  control.  What  Beecher 
was  in  religion,  Bryant  was  in  poetry — 
an  infusion  of  highly  liberalized  moral 
58 


THE   KNICKERBOCKER   ERA 

power.  Irving  said  there  was  nothing 
Puritanical  in  himself,  nor  had  he  any 
sympathy  with  Puritanism ;  and  Cooper 
hated  the  New  England  type,  though  he 
was  pietistic  to  an  uncommon  degree. 
Between  them  they  represented  the 
temper  of  the  New  York  community  on 
both  its  worldly  and  evangelical  side. 
Bryant,  however,  offers  a  sharp  contrast 
to  them,  for  he  had  precisely  that  depth 
of  moral  power  that  was  his  heritage 
from  Puritanism,  and  marked  in  the 
next  generation  the  literature  of  New 
England,  setting  it  off  from  the  litera 
ture  of  New  York.  Depth,  penetration, 
intensity,  all  that  religious  fervor  fosters 
and  spirituality  develops,  was  what  Ir 
ving  and  Cooper  could  lay  no  claim  to. 
In  Bryant  something  of  this,  in  an  early, 
primitive,  and  simple  form  of  liberalism, 
came  into  the  city,  though  it  was  not 
59 


AMERICA    IN    LITERATURE 

naturalized  there.  So  lonely  is  it,  in 
deed,  that  it  is  almost  impossible  for  the 
mind  to  identify  Bryant  the  poet  with 
Bryant  the  editor.  He  himself  kept  the 
two  lives  distinct,  and  his  distance  and 
coldness  was  the  aloofness  of  the  poet  in 
him  from  the  world  about  him. 

It  is  hard  jn  any  case  to  localize  Bry 
ant  not  merely  in  the  city,  but  in  Amer 
ica,  because  he  is  so  elemental  in  his  nat 
ural  piety.  That  something  Druidical 
which  there  is  in  his  aspect  sets  him 
apart ;  he  was  in  his  verse  a  seer,  or  what 
we  fancy  a  seer  to  be,  a  priest  of  the  holy 
affections  of  the  heart  in  communion  with 
nature's  God,  one  whose  point  of  view 
and  attitude  suggest  the  early  minis 
trations  of  adoring  Magians,  the  intui 
tions  of  Indian  sages,  or  the  meditations 
of  Greek  philosophers.  A  sensitive  mind 
can  hardly  rid  itself  of  this  old-world, 
60 


THE    KNICKERBOCKER   ERA 

or  early- world,  impression  in  respect  to 
Bryant.  The  hills  and  skies  of  Berk 
shire  had  roofed  a  temple  for  him,  and 
the  forest  aisled  it,  and  wherever  he 
moved  he  was  within  the  divine  pre 
cincts.  Eternity  was  always  in  the 
same  room  with  him.  It  was  this  sense 
of  grandeur  in  nature  and  man,  the  per 
petual  presence  of  a  cosmic  relation,  that 
dignified  his  verse  and  made  its  large 
impression;  even  his  little  blue  gentian 
has  the  atmosphere  of  the  whole  sky. 
He  was  a  master  of  true  style,  as  refined 
in  its  plainness  as  was  Irving's  in  its 
grace.  If  he  was  not  national  in  a  com 
prehensive  sense,  he  was  national  in  the 
sense  that  something  that  went  to  the 
making  of  the  nation  went  to  the  making 
of  him;  the  New  England  stock  which 
had  spread  into  the  West  and  veined 
the  continent  with  its  spirit,  as  ore  veins 
6r 


AMERICA    IN    LITERATURE 

the  rock,  was  of  the  same  stuff  as  him 
self,  and  the  race  manifestation  of  its 
fundamental  religious  feeling  in  his  pure 
and  uncovenanted  poetry  was  the  same 
as  in  Channing's  universality.  Present 
taste  may  forget  his  work  for  a  time,  but 
its  old  American  spirit  has  the  lasting 
power  of  a  horizon  peak;  from  those  up 
lands  we  came,  and  some  of  the  songs 
heard  there  the  nation  will  long  carry  in 
its  heart.  He  was  the  last  of  the  early 
triad  of  our  greater  writers,  and  his  pres 
ence  is  still  a  memory  in  the  city  streets; 
but  the  city  that  was  greater  for  his 
presence,  as  for  Irving  and  Cooper,  who 
had  passed  away  before  him,  is  also 
greater  for  their  memory. 

Between   the    major  and    the    lesser 

gods  of  the  city  there  is  a  great  gulf 

fixed.     Irving,  Cooper,  and  Bryant  were 

on  the  American  scale — they  were  nation- 

62 


THE    KNICKERBOCKER    ERA 

al  figures.  There  were  almost  none  who 
could  be  described  as  second  to  them. 
Every  metropolis,  however,  breeds  its 
own  race  of  local  writers,  like  mites  in  a 
cheese,  numerous  and  active,  the  literary 
coteries  of  their  moment.  To  name  one 
of  them,  there  was  Willis;  he  was  gigan 
tic  in  his  contemporaneousness.  He  is 
shrunk  now,  as  forgotten  as  a  fashion- 
plate,  though  once  the  cynosure  of  the 
literary  town.  He  was  the  man  that 
Irving,  by  his  richer  nature,  escaped 
being,  the  talented,  clever,  frivolous, 
sentimental,  graceful  artifice  of  a  man, 
the  town-gentleman  of  literature;  he 
was  the  male  counterpart  of  Fanny  Fern 
and  Grace  Greenwood;  he  outlasted  his 
vogue,  like  an  old  beau,  and  was  the 
superannuated  literary  journalist.  Yet 
in  no  other  city  was  he  so  much  at  home 
as  here,  and  in  the  memoirs  of  the  town 

63 


AMERICA    IN    LITERATURE 

he  would  fill  a  picturesque  and  rightful 
place.  A  court  would  have  embalmed 
him,  but  in  a  democracy  his  oblivion  is 
sealed. 

One  or  two  other  early  names  had  a 
sad  fortune  in  other  ways.  Drake  and 
Halleck  stand  for  our  boyish  precoc 
ity;  death  nipped  the  one,  trade  ster 
ilized  the  other;  there  is  a  mortuary  sug 
gestion  in  the  memory  of  both.  Halleck 
long  survived,  a  fine  outside  of  a  man, 
with  the  ghost  of  a  dead  poet  stalking 
about  in  him,  a  curious  experience  to 
those  who  met  him,  with  his  old-fash 
ioned  courtesy  and  the  wonder  of  his 
unliterary  survival.  Of  the  elder  gen 
eration  these  are  the  names  that  bring 
back  the  old  times,  Willis,  Drake,  and 
Halleck;  and  they  all  suggest  the  com 
munity  in  a  more  neighborly  way  than 
the  national  writers. 
64 


THE    KNICKERBOCKER    ERA 

There  was  a  culture  in  the  old  city 
which  bred  them,  and  a  taste  for  let 
ters  such  as  grows  up  where  there  are 
educated  men  of  the  professions  and  a 
college  to  breed  them.  The  slight  in 
fluence  of  Columbia,  however,  and  the 
main  fact  that  it  developed  professional 
and  technical  schools  instead  of  aca 
demic  power,  point  to  the  controlling 
factor  in  the  city's  life,  its  preoccupa 
tion  with  practical  and  material  inter 
ests.  Literature  was  bound  in  such  a 
modern  community  to  be  bottomed  on 
commerce;  whatever  else  it  might  be,  it 
was  first  an  article  of  trade  to  be  used 
as  news,  circulated  in  magazines,  sold 
in  books.  It  has  become,  at  present, 
largely  an  incident  of  advertising.  New 
York  was  a  great  distributing  centre, 
and  editors,  publishers,  and  writers  mul 
tiplied  exceedingly.  The  result  was  as 


AMERICA    IN    LITERATURE 

inevitable  here  as  in  London  or  Paris, 
but  the  absence  of  a  literary  past  and 
of  a  society  of  high  -  bred  variety  made 
a  vast  difference  in  the  tone  and  in  the 
product.  Parnassus  became  a  receding 
sentimental  memory,  fit  for  a  child's 
wonder  -  book  like  Hawthorne's;  but 
Bohemia  was  thronged,  and  its  denizens 
grew  like  mushrooms  in  a  cellar.  There 
was,  too,  from  the  beginning,  something 
bibulous  and  carnivorous  in  the  current 
literary  life;  the  salon  did  not  flourish, 
but  there  was  always  a  Bread-and- 
Cheese  Club;  and,  indeed,  from  the  days 
of  Irving's  youthful  suppers,  the  literary 
legend  of  the  city,  not  excluding  its 
greater  names,  might  be  interestingly 
and  continuously  told  by  a  series  of 
memoirs  of  its  convivial  haunts.  The 
men  who  frequented  them  and  kept  each 
other  in  countenance  were  as  mortal, 
66 


THE    KNICKERBOCKER   ERA 

for  the  most  part,  as  Pfaff's,  once  the 
Mermaid  Tavern  of  the  town -wits. 
Such  resorts,  too,  are  hot -houses  for  the 
development  of  clever  lads;  and  litera 
ture  suffered  by  the  over-production  of 
small  minds.  When  in  the  history  of 
letters  gregariousness  begins,  one  may 
look  out  for  mediocrity.  Great  writers 
have  found  themselves  in  exile,  in  prison, 
in  solitudes  of  all  sorts ;  and  great  books 
are  especially  written  in  the  country. 
Literature,  too,  is  naturally  exogamous; 
it  marries  with  the  remote,  the  foreign, 
the  strange,  and  requires  to  be  fertilized 
from  without;  but  Bohemia,  shut  in  its 
own  petty  frivolities,  breeds  the  race 
of  those  manikins  of  Manhattan  whose 
fame  Holmes  gibed  at  as  having  reached 
Harlem.  Open  Griswold  and  find  their 
works;  open  Poe's  Literati  and  find  their 
epitaphs;  of  such  is  the  kingdom  of  the 
67 


AMERICA    IN    LITERATURE 

Bohemians  the  world  over.  Such  a  race 
is  incidental  to  a  metropolitan  literature ; 
nor  were  they  altogether  inferior  men; 
many  of  them  led  useful  lives  and  won 
local  eminence;  some  even  achieved  the 
honors  of  diplomacy.  They  contributed 
much  to  their  own  gayety  and  enlivened 
life  with  mutual  admiration  and  con 
tempt.  Poe  stirred  up  the  swarm  con 
siderably.  But  no  satire  embalmed 
them  in  amber,  and  they  are  forgotten 
even  by  their  own  successors. 

The  city  grew  to  be,  through  these 
middle  years  of  the  century,  an  ever- 
increasing  mart  of  literary  trade.  The 
people,  with  their  schools  and  Sunday- 
schools  and  habits  of  home-reading,  were 
to  be  supplied  with  information  and  en 
tertainment,  and  New  York,  like  Phil 
adelphia,  became  a  great  manufactory 
of  books.  The  law  of  demand  and  sup- 
68 


THE    KNICKERBOCKER    ERA 

ply,  however,  has  a  limited  scope  in 
literature;  it  can  develop  quantity  but 
not  quality.  Text -books,  encyclopedias, 
popular  knowledge,  travel,  and  story 
all  spawned  in  great  numbers,  but 
the  literature  of  creation  and  culture 
continued  to  be  sparse.  It  might  have 
been  thought  that  the  literature  of 
amusement,  at  least,  would  have  flour 
ished,  and  songs  and  plays  have  abound 
ed;  in  fact,  they  did  not  exist  except  in 
the  mediocre  state.  This  infertility  of 
the  metropolis  in  the  lasting  forms  of 
literature  brings  home  to  us  the  almost 
incredible  famine  of  the  time  more  sharp 
ly  than  even  the  tales  that  are  told  of  the 
lack  of  expectation  of  any  appreciation 
felt  by  the  first  great  writers. 

Irving's  discovery  that  he  could  live  by 
literature  was  a  surprise  to  him ;  he  had 
begun  with  an  experiment  rather  than 


AMERICA    IN    LITERATURE 

an  ambition,  and,  having  thus  found  his 
humor,  he  went  on  to  make  trial  of  senti 
ment,  pathos,  and  romance.  Cooper  had 
no  confidence — scarcely  a  hope — that  an 
American  novel  would  be  accepted  by 
his  own  countrymen.  They  had  be 
come  so  used  to  their  lack  of  native  pro 
ductions  as  to  mistake  it  for  a  perma 
nent  state.  It  was  almost  an  accident 
that  Cooper  ever  finished  The  Spy,  and 
he  did  it  much  as  the  writer  of  a  poem 
of  classic  rank  to  -  day  would  complete 
it  —  in  the  scorn  of  circumstance  and 
probably  in  ignorance  of  its  reception. 

The  success  of  the  greater  writers  was 
immediate  and  great ;  the  city  gave  them 
dinners  and  has  reared  their  statues,  and 
was  proud  of  them  at  the  time  in  a  truly 
civic  way;  but  a  cold  obstruction  of 
genius  has  set  in  ever  since.  The  lesser 
writers  approached  them  only  on  their 
70 


THE    KNICKERBOCKER    ERA 

feeblest  side.  Perhaps  the  bulk  of  emo 
tional  writing  in  every  kind  was  of  the 
sentimental  sort.  The  men  produced  a 
good  deal  of  it,  but  the  women  revelled 
and  languished  in  it.  Ben  Bolt,  the  pop 
ular  concert  -  hall  tune  of  its  day,  was 
a  fair  example  of  its  masculine  form; 
and  such  writers  as  Mrs.  Osgood  and  the 
Gary  sisters  illustrate  its  feminine  modes. 
Sentimentality  is  apt  to  seem  very  fool 
ish  to  the  next  generation  in  its  words; 
but  in  character  it  survives  with  a  more 
realistic  impression;  and  in  Poe,  in  his 
relations  to  these  literary  women,  one 
sees  the  contemporary  type.  He  was 
mated  with  Willis  as  the  dark  with  the 
sunny,  and  as  misery  with  mirth.  He 
enchanted  the  poetesses  and  was  en 
chanted,  finding  in  each  one  a  new  lost 
Lenore.  All  his  female  figures,  in  their 
slightly  varied  monotone,  Annabel  and 


AMERICA    IN    LITERATURE 

Annie,  are  in  the  realm  of  this  sentimen 
tality  gone  maudlin  in  him  as  it  had 
gone  silly  in  others.  It  was  most  whole 
some  when  it  stayed  nearest  to  nature 
and  domestic  life;  but  there,  too,  it  was 
feeble  and  lachrymose.  The  breath  of  the 
civil  war  put  an  end  to  it  for  the  time; 
but  even  that  great  passion  left  few 
traces  of  itself  in  our  letters.  The  writ 
ings  of  Dickens  favored  sentimentality, 
and  much  more  the  poems  of  Mrs.  Brown 
ing  and  the  early  verse  of  Tennyson. 
We  had  our  "little  Dickenses,"  but  it  is 
significant  of  the  temperament  of  our 
literature  that  we  had  not  even  a  "lit 
tle"  Thackeray.  Just  above  this  level 
there  was  here  and  there  a  cultivated 
author,  reminiscent  of  sentiment  in  its 
purer  forms — of  Lamb  and  Irving,  for 
example — of  whose  small  number  Curtis 
stands  eminent  for  cheerfulness,  intrinsic 
72 


THE    KNICKERBOCKER    ERA 

winningness,  and  unfailing  grace.  He 
was  the  last  of  the  line  that  began  with 
Irving,  through  which  the  literary  his 
tory  of  the  city  can  be  traced  as  if  in 
lineal  descent.  In  him  sentiment  was 
what  it  should  always  be — a  touch,  not 
the  element  itself. 

It  is  quite  in  the  order  of  things  that 
in  a  literature  so  purely  romantic  as  our 
own  has  been  in  the  greater  writers,  sen 
timentality  should  characterize  those  of 
lesser  rank,  for  it  naturally  attends  ro 
manticism  as  an  inferior  satellite.  It 
has  all  vanished  now,  and  left  Lenore 
and  Annie  and  Annabel  its  lone  survivors. 
We  are  a  romantic  and  sentimental  na 
tion,  as  is  well  known,  and  we  are  also  a 
nation  of  efficiency.  The  literary  en 
ergies  of  the  nation,  apart  from  its  ge 
nius,  have  been  immense  in  reality ;  they 
have  gone  almost  wholly  into  popular 
73 


AMERICA    IN    LITERATURE 

education  in  its  varied  forms,  and  in  no 
city  upon  such  a  scale  as  in  New  York. 
The  magazines  and  the  great  dailies  ex 
hibit  this  activity  in  the  most  striking 
ways,  both  for  variety  and  distinction; 
and   on   the   side   of  literature,   in   the 
usual  sense,  from  the  days  of  the  old 
Mirror,  Knickerbocker,   and  Democratic 
the  growth  has  been  steady,   and  has 
carried  periodical  writing  to  its  height 
of  popular  efficiency  both  for  compass 
and  power.     The  multitude  of  writers 
in  the  service  have  been  substantially 
occupied  with  the  production  of  news  in 
the  broadest  sense.     The  poem  and  the 
essay  have  been  rather  things  conceded 
than  demanded,  and  make  but  a  small 
part  in  the  whole ;  but  the  news  of  the 
artistic,  literary,  and  scientific  worlds — 
fact,  event,  personality,  theory,  and  per 
formance — all  this  has  been  provided 
74 


THE    KNICKERBOCKER    ERA 

in  great  bulk.  The  writers  strive  to  en 
gage  attention,  to  interest;  and  the  mat 
ter  of  prime  interest  in  such  a  city  is  the 
news  of  the  various  world.  Even  in  the 
imaginative  field  something  of  the  same 
sort  is  to  be  observed  in  the  usual 
themes  and  motives.  The  detective 
story,  for  example,  Japanese  or  other 
foreign  backgrounds,  the  novel  of  ad 
venture,  and  travel  and  animal  sketches 
and  the  like,  have  an  element  of  news; 
and  the  entire  popularization  of  knowl 
edge  belongs  in  the  same  region  of  in 
terest.  Thought,  reflection,  meditation, 
except  on  political  and  social  subjects, 
does  not  flourish;  that  brooding  on  life 
and  experience,  out  of  which  the  great 
est  literature  emerges,  has  not  been 
found,  whatever  the  reason  may  be,  and, 
in  fact,  it  is  rather  a  matter  of  original 
endowment  than  of  the  environment. 
75 


AMERICA    IN    LITERATURE 

The  literary  craft,  however,  if  it  lacked 
genius,  has  been  characterized  by  facile 
and  versatile  talent,  and  its  product  has 
been  very  great  in  mass  and  of  vast 
utility.  In  no  other  city  is  the  power 
of  the  printed  word  more  impressive. 
The  true  literature  of  the  city  is,  in 
reality,  and  has  long  been,  its  great  dai 
lies  ;  they  are  for  the  later  time  what  the 
sermons  of  the  old  clergy  were  in  New 
England — the  mental  sphere  of  the  com 
munity — and  in  them  are  to  be  found 
all  the  elements  of  literature  except  the 
qualities  that  secure  permanence. 


THE    LITERARY    AGE    OF 
BOSTON 

HARVARD  COLLEGE  was  the 
fountain  -  head  of  New  England 
literature.  Boston  would  have  been  an 
interesting  place  without  its  fructifying 
neighbor,  such  was  its  civic  stock;  with 
its  double  lobe  of  Puritan  and  Pilgrim, 
it  would  have  been  the  brain  of  the 
State,  a  mart  of  trade,  and  a  nest  of 
rebels,  but  hardly,  perhaps,  one  of  the 
little,  historic  Meccas  that  perpetually 
challenge  the  real  importance  of  metro 
politan  vastness ;  and  in  the  hearts  of  its 
people,  at  least,  with  Florence  and  Edin- 
77 


AMERICA    IN    LITERATURE 

burgh,  not  to  be  profane  with  diviner 
names,  Boston  brings  up  the  rear  of 
small  but  famous  towns.  Whatever 
of  truth  there  is  in  this  well-known 
boast  comes  from  the  College.  It  hap 
pened  in  the  old  days,  long  before  Har 
vard  became  the  high  altar  of  learning  it 
now  is,  the  feeding  flame  of  manifold 
lofty  causes,  sacrosanct  with  honorable 
lives  and  the  votive  wealth  of  dying  gen 
erations  set  apart  for  the  disinterested 
uses  of  men ;  the  present  University,  with 
its  millions  of  money  devoted  to  the  un 
born  millions  of  our  people,  is  a  latter- 
day  miracle  with  its  own  future  all  be 
fore  it;  but  in  the  time  that  was,  in  the 
two  centuries  of  humbleness,  when  the 
old  College  was  still  only  the  camp-fire 
kindled  by  the  Muses  in  the  wilder 
ness,  there  lies  an  accomplished  past,  a 
work  ended  and  done,  whose  memory 

78 


THE   LITERARY  AGE   OF  BOSTON 

most  survives  in  the  literary  fame  of 
Boston. 

The  collegiate  spark,  which  is  now 
parcelled  out  among  museums  and  lab 
oratories,  and  feeds  an  immense  power 
house  of  technical  arts,  applied  sciences, 
and  lucrative  professions,  was  then 
rather  a  thing  of  men's  bosoms,  of  the 
instincts  of  imagination,  the  guesses  of 
philosophy,  the  intuitions  of  religion;  if 
the  University,  through  the  inculcation 
of  scientific  knowledge  and  its  varied 
training  for  useful  pursuits,  has  now 
become  more  a  great  prop  of  the  mate 
rial  state,  the  College  discharged  well  its 
elder  function  as  a  restorer  of  the  human 
spirit  through  the  seeking  of  truth ;  and 
under  its  plain  academic  rule,  before  the 
old  order  changed,  giving  place  to  new, 
Harvard  came  into  vital  touch  with  the 
thoughts  of  men,  and  bore  once  that  lit- 
79 


AMERICA    IN    LITERATURE 

tie,  unnoticed  flower  of  the  soul  whose 
seeds  at  last  are  blown  throughout  the 
world.  It  began,  perhaps,  in  the  time 
of  Channing,  and  the  first  true  contact 
may  have  been  in  that  pure,  mild  spirit ; 
then  the  young  Emerson  left  the  pulpit, 
the  young  Phillips  mounted  the  plat 
form;  outside — for  the  academic  race  is 
never  more  than  a  small  part  of  the  va 
rious  and  abounding  state — Garrison 
struck  the  hour.  It  was  a  crude,  strange, 
composite  time.  The  phalanx  was  con 
verging  on  Brook  Farm;  dervishes  of  all 
kinds  were  camping  round  the  Saadi  tent 
at  Concord;  Hawthorne,  Longfellow,  and 
Lowell  kept  their  lettered  seclusion  un 
disturbed;  the  Lyceum  multiplied  like 
a  torch  from  village  to  village;  and  the 
new  woman  of  the  period  had  grown  up 
in  Margaret  Fuller,  and,  in  fact,  in  So 
phia  Peabody  and  Maria  White  she  was 
80 


THE  LITERARY  AGE  OF  BOSTON 

already  wedded  to  Hawthorne  and  Low 
ell.     It  was  the  literary  age  of  Boston. 

The  traits  of  the  period  are  still  hard 
to  grasp.  The  immense  crudity  of  that 
age  taxes  our  credulity,  and  at  times 
perplexes  us  by  arousing  the  sense  of 
humor  instead  of  exciting  the  organ  of 
reverence.  "Thou  shalt  read  Hafiz," 
says  Emerson,  as  he  lays  down  the  gos 
pels;  and  the  modern  reader  of  Hafiz 
stands  aghast!  The  amazing  contra 
dictions — young  parsons  leaders  of  the 
mob;  the  naive  surprises;  Lowell  as  a 
temperance  lecturer  at  the  picnic  where 
Maria  White  as  queen  was  crowned  with 
a  coronal  of  pond-lilies;  the  suggestions, 
now  of  a  deodorized  Bohemia  at  Fresh 
Pond,  or  the  Arcadia  of  married  lovers 
and  confirmed  hermits  at  Walden,  now 
of  the  milieu  of  the  Vicar  of  Wakefield, 
and  again  of  some  fete  champetre  in 

6  8l 


AMERICA    IN    LITERATURE 

Sterne  —  all  puzzle  the  ingenuous  and 
unacclimated  mind.  The  provinciality 
of  the  life  is  as  fresh  and  startling,  and  as 
humanly  interesting,  as  in  the  work  of 
great  novelists.  The  wonderful  rurality 
of  Lowell's  youth,  scarcely  guessed  even 
by  his  biographers,  is  one  extreme;  the 
other  is,  let  us  say,  Allston,  returned 
from  abroad.  He  had  known  Coleridge. 
What  a  figure  he  wore  in  Cambridgeport ! 
Had  Jane  Austen  lived  her  girlhood  at 
Salem,  or  Peacock  passed  a  summer  at 
Concord,  what  delightful  mischief  might 
have  been  ours!  What  an  enrichment 
of  our  literature  in  eccentric  and  ever- 
laughable  realism!  But  the  society  of 
which  Allston  was  an  ornament,  the 
study  of  Ticknor,  the  dining-room  of 
Judge  Prescott,  the  counting-room  of 
Francis  and  Thorndike,  the  court -room 
of  Mason  and  Shaw,  would  have  required 
82 


THE   LITERARY  AGE  OF  BOSTON 

a  yet  more  masterly  hand.  We  get 
glimpses  of  it  in  memoirs  and  anecdotes, 
but  the  scene  yet  waits  its  author,  and 
is  most  like  to  pass  away  without  a  poet. 
Yet  this  conservative,  commercial,  re 
spectable  society  of  the  travelled  and 
home-keeping  provincials  is  the  back 
ground  on  which  must  be  relieved  the 
radicalism  of  Emerson  and  Phillips,  the 
elegance  of  Longfellow,  the  self-suffi 
ciency  of  Hawthorne,  the  manhood- 
worth  of  Whittier,  the  Brahmin  pride  of 
Holmes,  the  cleverness  of  Lowell.  If 
the  background  be  so  impossible  to 
sketch,  still  more  is  the  sway  and  jostle 
of  the  contemporary  crowd.  Only  a 
few  impressions  are  firm  enough  to  be 
put  down. 

Emerson  stands  the  foremost  figure. 
In  him  the  spirituality  of  New  England 
culminated  and  was  so  blended  with 


AMERICA   IN   LITERATURE 

practical  character  as  to  make  him  a 
very  high  type  of  his  race.  Spirituality 
was  of  the  essence  of  New  England  from 
its  birth,  and  underlies  its  historic  de 
mocracy  as  the  things  of  eternity  under 
lie  the  things  of  time.  In  the  earlier  age, 
however,  the  soul-life  was  cramped  in 
archaisms  of  thought  and  breeding  and 
all  expression  was  in  stiffened  forms. 
This  Puritan  past  impresses  our  minds 
now  very  much  as  Byzantine  art  affects 
our  eyes — as  a  thing  in  bonds.  It  is  real, 
though  remote;  it  shrouds  mysteries  of 
religious  feeling  dark  to  us;  but,  above 
all  else,  it  seems  a  spirit  imprisoned. 
Blake  might  so  have  pictured  it  more 
intelligibly  with  his  rude  strength;  a 
thing  gaunt,  tragic,  powerful,  one  of  the 
Titan  forms  of  human  suffering.  The 
enlargement,  the  enfranchisement,  the 
new  sphere  of  light,  of  labor  and  prayer 

84 


THE  LITERARY  AGE  OF  BOSTON 

had  come  before  Emerson;  he  was  born 
into  a  free  world.  The  spread  of  Unita- 
rianism  in  New  England  was  a  growth 
in  the  order  of  nature ;  it  was  not  revo 
lutionary;  it  was  normal  development; 
and  in  this  mental  expansion  and  moral 
softening,  in  the  amelioration  of  the 
American  spirit  in  all  ways,  which  Uni- 
tarianism  denoted  in  the  community, 
Harvard  College  was  the  radiating  influ 
ence.  By  his  collegiate,  clerical  fathers, 
Emerson  was  in  the  first  line  of  those 
who  were  to  share  the  new  thought  and 
advance  the  new  practice.  The  work  of 
Channing  and  his  friends  is  not  to  be  for 
gotten,  but  in  the  lapse  of  time  it  has 
lost  distinction,  and  blurs  into  half -re 
membered  things  like  ancestral  strains, 
the  climax  of  the  liberal  movement  was 
in  Emerson's  genius,  and  there  shines, 
concentrated,  a  white  light  of  the  spirit 

85 


AMERICA    IN    LITERATURE 

for  a  long  age.  He  was  a  pure  radical ; 
we  are  apt  to  forget  how  radical  he  was. 
Harvard  recoiled,  astounded  and  indig 
nant  at  the  son  she  had  borne;  yet  it 
was  from  within  her  halls — and  it  is  ever 
to  be  remembered  for  Harvard  honor — 
that  both  the  academic  and  the  religious 
proclamation  went  forth  from  his  lips, 
in  the  Phi  Beta  Kappa  oration  and  the 
Divinity  School  Address;  and,  however 
the  elders  might  disown  and  protest,  the 
words  fell  on  good  ground  in  the  hearts 
of  youth  and  multiplied  sixty  and  a  hun 
dred  fold.  It  is  not  without  reason  that 
the  Hall  of  Philosophy  there  should  bear 
his  name,  now  that  all  old  controversies 
have  fallen  asleep,  for  both  by  his  in 
heritance  from  the  past  and  his  influ 
ence  upon  the  American  world  Harvard 
was  the  corner-stone  of  his  pure  and 
high  fame. 

86 


THE  LITERARY  AGE  OF  BOSTON 

But,  though  Harvard  and  the  things 
of  Harvard  were  the  essential  environ 
ment  of  Emerson,  and  he  was  the  child 
of  the  old  College  in  a  much  larger  sense 
than  is  usually  meant  by  that  phrase, 
there  was  something  of  much  greater 
import  in  his  genius,  deeper,  fast-rooted 
in  what  lies  below  education,  intellect, 
and  books,   something  communal  that 
made  him  even  more  the  son  of  the  soil, 
one  of  the  people.     He  had  that  quality 
of  race  which  marks  the  aristocrat  in 
the  real  sense  of  that  word,  whose  abuse 
has  almost  exiled  it  from  the  speech  of 
truth.     What    characterized   the    stock 
shone  forth  in  him  highly  perfected  and 
efficient,  in  the  form  of  character,  on  both 
its  heavenward  and  its  earthward  sides, 
and  he  possessed,  besides,  that  accom 
plishment   of   language   which    allowed 
him  to  give  the  racial  element  in  the 
87 


AMERICA    IN    LITERATURE 

form  of  literature.  He  would  have  been 
called,  as  the  world  goes,  a  poor  man, 
but  in  his  own  village  he  was  well-off; 
he  lived,  on  his  thousand  or  more  dollars 
a  year,  the  life  of  a  refined  gentleman, 
and  reared  his  family,  like  others  of  his 
own  station,  on  this  sum  in  an  atmos 
phere  of  true  cultivation;  he  was  eco 
nomical,  frugal  even,  and  independent; 
but  what  distinguished  him,  and  made 
him  a  true  leader  in  that  homogeneous 
community,  was  that  he  kept  the  old 
perspective  of  the  relative  worth  of  spir 
itual  and  temporal  things,  inherited 
from  Puritan  days  in  the  habits  of  the 
mind,  and  held  to  the  lasting  transcend 
ency  of  the  one  and  the  evanescence  of 
the  other,  without  any  sense  of  effort  or 
consciousness  of  peculiarity,  just  as  his 
neighbors  also  did,  but  he  did  it  in  a  sin 
gularly  high  and  exemplary  way. 
88 


THE  LITERARY  AGE  OF  BOSTON 

In  a  world  so  conceived  his  freedom 
was  remarkable,  his  disengagement,  his 
independence  of  thought  and  action  both, 
his  responsibility  only  to  himself,  his  in 
difference  to  others'  views.  Scarce  any 
man  was  so  free  as  he.  His  self-posses 
sion  in  this  attitude  was  almost  spectac 
ular  to  others.  It  struck  them  as  "  sub 
lime  insolence,"  and  any  number  of  such 
phrases  of  amazement  at  a  man  who  was 
simply  true  to  himself,  and  took  no 
more  thought  of  the  crowd  or  of  the  in 
dividual  than  he  did  of  the  morrow. 
Truth  had  never  a  better  seeker ,  he  took 
only  what  was  necessary  for  the  journey, 
and  what  he  found  with  his  eyes  he  de 
clared  with  his  lips.  Things  that  were 
not  in  the  line  of  his  search  did  not  in 
terest  him;  they  might  be  matters  as 
grave  and  sacred,  as  endeared  and  in 
timate,  as  the  Holy  Communion,  but 


AMERICA    IN    LITERATURE 

he  passed  on;  of  course  he  shocked 
many  a  tender  conscience  and  many  a 
hardy  dogmatist,  but  he  was  ignorant  of 
it  essentially,  being  clad  in  a  panoply  of 
innocence  that  was  almost  simplicity  of 
mind.  The  same  spirit  that  he  showed 
in  religious  thought  he  exhibited  also 
in  politics,  and  not  temporary  politics 
only,  but  that  lasting  Americanism  which 
he  moulded  into  so  many  memorable 
phrases  of  freedom,  equality,  and  fra 
ternity. 

His  time  of  illumination  was  in  early 
manhood,  and  the  little  work  called  Nat 
ure  was  its  gospel ;  later,  as  he  travelled 
farther  from  the  light,  he  declined  on 
more  mundane  matters  of  morals  and 
manners,  on  conduct,  on  the  question  of 
human  behavior  in  one  or  another  way, 
and  left  the  old,  speculative  table-lands 
of  his  youth,  and  with  him  life  after 
90 


THE  LITERARY  AGE  OF  BOSTON 

thirty -five  was  a  declining  day.  Yet 
always  his  method  was  by  intuition ;  his 
courage  responded  to  the  challenge  of 
the  unknown,  to  the  tangle  -  growth  of 
poetry  and  philosophy,  to  the  dragon- 
jaws  of  paradox;  and  if  at  times,  in  our 
more  sophisticated  sight,  Emerson  in 
his  mental  adventures  seems  to  suffer 
from  the  irrepressible  joke  that  lurks  in 
life,  almost  like  some  Parson  Adams  of 
the  mind,  he  is  only  thereby  brought  the 
nearer  to  our  home-breed,  and  graced 
the  more  with  that  nameless  quality 
which,  in  other  ways,  also  shines  from 
his  figure,  and  endears  the  Don  Quixote 
of  every  idealistic  race.  Such  he  was — 
the  idealism  of  New  England  in  its  hu 
man  saintship;  or,  if  not  quite  that,  as 
near  it  as  Heaven  ever  makes  the  living 
Don  Quixotes  of  real  life. 

These  analogies  may  seem  derogatory, 


AMERICA   IN   LITERATURE 

but  they  are  not  really  so;  they  are,  in 
their  sphere,  patents  of  true  nobility,  an 
other  sort  of  crowning  phrase  to  tell  how 
that  in  his  mortal  life  he  was  not  un 
touched  by  the  pathetic  grotesqueness 
which  clings  to  the  idealist  everywhere 
in  this  tough  world,  while  in  his  soul  he 
was  also  the  white  flower  of  Puritanism 
— ftos  regum,  the  last  of  his  race.  Puri 
tanism,  the  old  search  for  God  in  New 
England,  ended  in  him;  and  he  became 
its  medium  at  its  culminating  moment 
of  vision  and  freedom,  because  he  was  a 
racial  man,  and  held,  condensed,  puri 
fied,  and  heightened  in  his  own  heart, 
the  developed  genius  of  the  small,  free, 
resolute,  righteous,  God-fearing  people, 
the  child  of  whose  brief  centuries  he  was; 
they  found  no  other  world-voice.  Em 
erson  was  their  gift  at  the  great  altar  of 
man. 

92 


THE  LITERARY  AGE  OF  BOSTON 

If  Emerson  was  the  concentration  and 
embodiment  of  the  inward  Puritan  life, 
the  strength  and  beauty  of  the  naked 
soul  that  had  cast  the  garment  of  the 
past  and  emerged  at  last  in  lucid  regions, 
Longfellow — who,  perhaps  from  some 
prepossession  in  favor  of  poets,  I  cannot 
but  regard  as  second  in  the  New  Eng 
land  group — was  representative  of  the 
outward  charm  of  intellectual  culture 
as  it  came  to  fulness  in  the  community ; 
and,  though  it  may  seem  a  mere  subtlety 
to  say  so,  intellectual  culture  is,  in  truth, 
an  outward  thing.  So,  too,  as  Harvard, 
by  virtue  of  being  the  fount  of  the  old 
ministry,  the  place  of  the  enlightenment 
and  enlargement  when  the  kinder  hour 
came,  and  the  nursery  of  the  youth  who 
heard  and  followed  the  new  voice,  had 
bred,  nourished,  and  supported  Emer 
son,  the  old  College  also  performed  a 
93 


AMERICA    IN    LITERATURE 

similar  service  for  Longfellow,  opening 
the  way  for  him,  yielding  him  a  place  in 
the  midst  of  her  power,  and  surround 
ing  him  from  youth  to  age  with  such  a 
happy  environment  of  friends  and  things 
that  he  might  well  think  of  his  lot  as  the 
special  favor  of  Heaven. 

He  was  Maine-born,  and  reared  at  the 
neighboring  college  of  Bowdoin,  to  whose 
academic  influences  he  was  greatly  in 
debted;  but  Harvard,  in  adopting  him, 
made  him  her  own,  and  gave  him  a  ca 
reer  among  her  own,  and  he  and  the  hu 
mane  studies  he  stood  for  became  an  in 
tegral  and  lasting  part  of  the  ideal  of 
Harvard  culture,  which  has  suffered  no 
essential  change  even  now,  though  its 
relative  sphere  at  Harvard  is  much  nar 
rowed,  partaking  the  spiritual  retrogres 
sion,  the  decline  in  refinement,  of  the  na 
tion  at  large.  It  is  true  that  this  ideal 
Q4 


THE   LITERARY  AGE  OF  BOSTON 

of  Harvard  culture  had  already  begun  to 
form  before  Longfellow's  time.  Just  as 
Channing  had  prepared  the  way  for  Em 
erson  in  the  things  of  the  pure  spirit, 
George  Ticknor  was  the  precursor  of 
Longfellow,  not  only  as  a  scholar  in 
whom  the  refining  power  of  scholarship 
was  eminent,  but  as  a  scholar  in  the  same 
fields  of  literature.  Yet  the  crest  of  the 
wave,  which  was  the  first  movement  of 
Old-World  culture  across  the  Atlantic, 
was  certainly  Longfellow's  Dante,  of 
which  his  earlier  collections  and  trans 
lations  were  forerunners,  and  to  which 
Lowell's  work,  when  he  came  to  succeed 
him,  was  hardly  more  than  an  appen 
dix.  That  first  appropriation  of  foreign 
thought  in  New  England  took  place  so 
obscurely,  and  had  so  few  distinctive  re 
sult6'  in  our  own  literature,  that  its  his 
tory  and  import  are  much  forgotten.  It 
95 


AMERICA    IN    LITERATURE 

deserves  a  little  chapter  to  itself  when 
our  literature  comes  to  be  written  in  any 
other  than  a  biographical  form. 

The  impact  of  Carlyle  and  a  few  other 
single  figures,  such  as  Goethe,  Lessing, 
Fourier,  is  sometimes  noted,  and  to  such 
writers  as  Ripley  and  Margaret  Fuller, 
Hedge  and  Hilliard,  much  is  due.  What 
Longfellow  accomplished  did  not  lie  so 
much  in  this  field  of  individual  authors 
and  specific  thought  on  particular  mat 
ters  then  of  current  interest ;  he  brought 
over,  as  it  were,  whole  literatures,  putting 
us  in  touch  as  a  nation  with  the  tongues 
of  the  north  and  south  of  Europe  alike, 
with  all  the  shores  of  old  romance,  with 
the  spirit  that  abides  beautiful  in  the 
chronicles  of  wasted  time;  he  annexed 
by  a  stroke  of  the  pen  this  literary  past 
of  Europe  to  our  New  World;  at  least 
to  him,  as  unquestionably  the  first  mod- 


THE  LITERARY  AGE  OF  BOSTON 

era  scholar  of  his  time,  a  scholar  of  the 
spirit  as  well  as  of  the  text,  go  the  praise 
and  the  grateful  remembrance  of  all 
who  have  since  followed,  though  far 
off,  in  his  footsteps.  So  Emerson,  too, 
first  felt  the  fructifying  power  of  Ori 
ental  thought  in  his  own  sphere  of 
philosophy  and  the  poetry  of  general 
causes,  and  interpreted  it  somewhat, 
however  defective  the  interpetation ; 
and  through  these  two  men  largely  such 
expansion  as  contrasts  with  fresh  and 
novel  literatures  can  give  came  to  our 
education.  It  is  in  this  part  of  his  work 
that  Harvard,  holding  up  Longfellow's 
hands,  most  helped  the  cause  of  civili 
zation  so  far  as  that  is  involved  in  the 
permanence  of  literature,  and  received 
for  her  reward  that  ideal  of  Harvard 
culture,  already  referred  to,  which  is  em 
bedded  in  her  traditions. 
7  97 


AMERICA   IN   LITERATURE 

As  a  scholar  Longfellow  was  cosmo 
politan,  but  in  that  portion  of  his  life 
which  was  the  fruit  of  his  poetic  gift 
he  was  distinctively  American.  If  the 
mildness  of  his  nature  be  considered,  the 
fervor  of  Longfellow's  patriotism  was  a 
very  marked  quality;  his  habitual  artis 
tic  control  conceals  its  real  force,  but 
does  not  hide  its  clear  depth;  from  the 
early  days,  when  he  was  all  for  Amer 
icanism  in  literature,  through  his  man 
hood  friendship  with  Sumner,  and  his 
anti-slavery  poems,  to  the  darker  days 
of  the  sinking  of  the  Cumberland  and  the 
prayer  for  the  ship  of  state,  he  was  one 
with  his  country's  aspiration,  struggle, 
and  trial,  one  in  heart  with  her  life;  but 
he  showed  this  patriotic  prepossession 
of  his  whole  nature,  if  less  touchingly, 
still  more  significantly,  by  his  choice  of 
American  themes  for  what  were  in  no 


THE  LITERARY  AGE  OF  BOSTON 

sense  occasional  poems,  but  the  greater 
works  in  which  he  built  most  consciously 
and  patiently  for  her  fame  in  poetry — 
in  Hiawatha,  Evangeline,  Miles  Stan- 
dish,  and  the  like.  It  is  the  fashion 
to  decry  these  poems  now,  yet  the  fact 
cannot  be  gainsaid  that  each  of  these 
remains  the  only  successful  poem  of 
its  kind — one  of  Indian  life,  one  of  the 
colonial  pastoral,  one  of  the  Puritan 
idyl — while  the  trials  made  by  others 
have  been  numerous;  and  in  each  of 
these,  but  especially  in  the  first  two, 
there  is  in  quality  a  marvellous  purity 
of  tone  which,  for  those  who  are  sensi 
tive  to  it,  is  one  of  the  rarest  of  poetic 
pleasures.  It  is  also  the  fashion  to  de 
cry  the  shorter  poems  by  which  Long 
fellow  entered  into  the  homes  of  the  peo 
ple,  but  if  Heaven  ever  grants  the  pray 
er  that  a  poet  may  write  the  songs  of  a 
99 


AMERICA   IN   LITERATURE 

people,  it  is  surely  in  such  poems  as  these 
that  the  divine  gift  reveals  its  presence. 
They  are  in  the  mouths  of  children  and 
on  the  lips  of  boys,  and  that  is  well;  but 
they  are  also  strength  and  consolation 
to  older  hearts;  they  are  read  in  quiet 
hours,  they  are  murmured  in  darkened 
rooms,  they  blend  with  the  sacred  ex 
periences  of  many  lives.  Say  what  one 
will,  the  Psalm  of  Life  is  a  trumpet- 
call,  and  a  music  breathes  from  Resig 
nation,  in  which  the  clod  on  the  coffin 
ceases  to  be  heard,  and  dies  out  of  the 
ear  at  last  with  peace.  In  the  grosser 
spirit  of  life  that  now  everywhere  pre 
vails,  even  among  the  best,  and  is  not 
confined  to  any  one  sphere  of  politics, 
art,  or  letters,  nor  to  any  one  country 
or  capital,  it  is  not  surprising  that  the 
fame  of  Longfellow  should  be  obscured; 
but  his  silent  presence  must  still  be  deep- 
100 


THE  LITERARY  AGE  OF  BOSTON 

ly  and  widely  felt  in  those  simpler  and 
million  homes  that  make  up  the  popular 
life  which,  as  the  whole  history  of  poetry 
shows,  can  never  be  corrupted.  Long 
fellow  had  this  remarkable  and  double 
blessing:  he  was  the  product  of  the  old 
Puritan  stock  at  its  culminating  moment 
of  refinement,  its  most  cultivated  gentle 
man,  and  he  also  enters  most  easily  at 
lowly  doors. 

Hawthorne  is  the  third  great  New 
England  name,  and  many  would  place 
him  higher  than  either  Emerson  or  Long 
fellow,  in  valuing  his  pure  genius;  but 
from  the  point  of  view  here  taken,  which 
is  mainly  one  of  historical  significance 
and  the  communal  life,  he  falls  necessa 
rily  into  an  inferior  position.  He,  too, 
was  the  child  of  the  old  Puritanism,  and, 
like  the  others,  was  emancipated  from 
its  bonds  from  boyhood ;  but  something 
101 


AMERICA   IN    LITERATURE 

stayed  in  his  blood  which  in  the  others 
had  suffered  a  happy  change.  The  gen 
ius  of  Emerson  and  Longfellow  worked 
in  the  line  of  growth,  so  that  they  mark 
in  their  different  spheres  the  attainment 
of  a  new  goal ;  the  genius  of  Hawthorne 
involved  rather  a  reversion  to  the  Puri 
tan  past,  and,  not  only  that,  but  to  what 
was  grim,  harsh,  and  terrible  in  its  spirit; 
his  genius  worked  in  a  reactionary  way 
upon  the  theme  of  his  brooding,  and  he 
threw  open  the  doors  of  the  past  rather 
than  the  gates  of  the  future.  He  found 
what  people  find  in  tombs — dead  sins 
and  mouldered  garments  of  the  soul. 
Puritanism  was  to  him  a  dreadful  mem 
ory,  which  so  fastened  on  his  mind  as 
to  obtain  new  life,  like  an  evil  obsession 
there,  as  if,  in  truth,  it  were  still  con 
temporary  in  men's  bosoms  too,  and  he 
could  read  them  by  its  dark  light. 
102 


THE  LITERARY  AGE  OF  BOSTON 

This  recrudescence  of  Puritanism,  in 
an  imaginative  form,  in  Hawthorne, 
was  the  cardinal  thing  about  him  in 
relation  to  the  community;  by  virtue 
of  it  he  made  Tuscany  another  Salem, 
and  gave  the  treasures  of  Catholic  art 
to  feed  the  fires  of  the  Puritan  Moloch. 
His  village  world  of  observation  was 
his  own,  as  he  saw  it  in  daily  life  and 
faithfully  recorded  it;  but  his  world  of 
imagination  was  the  old  Puritan  coun 
try  -  side,  seen  in  spectral,  uncanny, 
Dantesque  ways,  a  hateful  past  full  of 
pictures  turning  to  life  under  his  hand, 
to  your  life  and  my  life,  to  the  life  of  man 
as  it  is  in  the  eternal  present.  He  could 
not  shake  it  off;  his  genius  cast  shadow; 
he  was  a  profound  pessimist — sin  to  him 
was  life.  Out  of  all  this  came  a  sin 
gle  new  creation,  which  with  Knicker 
bocker  and  Leatherstocking  makes  the 
103 


AMERICA    IN    LITERATURE 

third  original  American  type,  Donatello; 
like  them,  he  has  no  basis  in  vital  life;  he 
is  a  blend  of  elemental  things,  a  dream 
of  the  mind,  an  emanation  half  of  the 
artistic  senses  of  a  poetic  temperament 
in  love  with  life,  half  of  the  remorseful 
thought  of  a  heart  that  had  "kept  watch 
o'er  man's  mortality";  but,  visionary 
as  he  is,  Donatello  is  a  true  imaginative 
type,  no  more  to  be  forgotten  than  the 
other  purely  artistic  figures  of  literature, 
like  Sir  Galahad,  like  the  Red  Cross 
Knight,  of  whose  race  he  is.  It  seems 
a  miracle  of  time  that  drew  out  of 
the  dark  bosom  of  Puritanism  this  fig 
ure  of  the  early  world,  fair  with  Greek 
beauty,  and  made  its  plastic  loveliness 
the  flower  in  art  of  the  Puritan  con 
science. 

It  is  art  that  finally  sets  Hawthorne 
aloof  from  the  others  in  a  place  of  his 
104 


THE  LITERARY  AGE  OF  BOSTON 

own.  It  might  almost  be  said  that  for 
him  heredity  had  become  environment, 
so  much  did  the  past  oversway  the  pres 
ent  in  his  moral  temperament,  his  out 
look  on  life,  and  his  probings  of  its 
mysteries;  his  genius,  in  its  most  con 
centrated  and  intense  work,  was  deeply 
engaged  in  this  inherited  subject-matter, 
this  reluctant,  repellent,  stubborn  Puri 
tan  stuff,  the  dark,  hard  ore;  but  the 
object  of  his  attention  being  thus  given, 
and  the  manner  of  its  interpretation 
being  born  in  him,  also,  he  remained  for 
the  rest  more  the  pure  literary  artist 
than  his  contemporaries  in  New  Eng 
land  ;  the  instinct  of  romantic  art  for  its 
own  mere  sake  was  in  him.  In  the  ex 
panding  life  of  New  England  this  thing, 
too,  had  happened  with  other  things:  an 
artist  had  been  born  there.  He  was 
strangely  indifferent  to  everything  in 
IOS 


AMERICA    IN    LITERATURE 

the  community,  he  was  solitary  and  a 
man  apart;  but  he  was  faithful  to  his 
own  one  talent,  the  power  to  take  an 
original  view  of  the  world,  a  romantic 
view,  and  turn  it  to  pictures  in  the  loom 
of  literature.  The  world  remained  the 
old  Puritan  world,  all  the  world  he  knew ; 
but  in  his  eyes  it  became  a  pictorial  thing, 
while  retaining,  necessarily,  its  moral  sub 
stance  and  tragic  suggestiveness,  and  it 
took  on  artistic  form  under  his  hand. 
His  love  for  his  art  and  the  things  in 
life  that  would  feed  it  was  absorbing; 
he  idled  at  all  times  when  not  employed 
with  it;  he  found  his  happiness  in  ex 
ercising  it ;  it  was  his  art  that  was  neces 
sary  to  him,  not  its  message;  he  lived 
by  imagination.  In  him,  consequently, 
the  communal  life  is  seen  in  the  last  of 
its  threefold  manifestations  in  the  litera 
ture  of  the  old  Puritan  race ;  in  Emerson 
106 


THE  LITERARY  AGE  OF  BOSTON 

it  shows  forth  in  the  pure  soul,  in  Long 
fellow  it  blossomed  in  the  heart,  and  in 
Hawthorne  it  left,  as  on  darkness,  its 
imaginative  dream. 

In  these  three  men  the  genius  of  the 
people,  working  out  in  the  place  and 
among  the  things  of  its  New  England 
nativity,  reached  its  height,  so  far  as 
concerns  that  partial  expression  which 
literature  can  give  to  a  people's  life. 
They  were  surrounded  by  manifold 
other  activities  of  the  communal  spirit, 
in  politics,  trade,  philanthropy,  taking 
place  in  a  busy  state;  they  were  sup 
ported,  however,  by  an  educated  class 
in  large  numbers  of  similar  breeding, 
sympathetic  in  taste  and  interest,  and 
openly  appreciative  of  their  labors;  and 
there  were,  also,  perhaps  a  score  of  other 
writers  about  them  among  whom  three 
still  stand  out  with  great  prominence — 
107 


AMERICA    IN    LITERATURE 

Holmes,  Whittier,  and  Lowell — of  whom 
two,  as  in  the  other  group,  were  closely 
bound  to  Harvard  College. 

Holmes  was,  in  fact,  what  he  liked  to 
be  thought — a  town  wit.  His  attach 
ment  to  the  English  of  the  eighteenth 
century  was  the  result  of  a  native  sym 
pathy.  He  was  a  citified  man,  such  as 
the  old  Londoners  were.  He  was  not  so 
much  a  New  -  Englander  as  he  was  a 
Bostonian,  and  not  so  much  a  Bostonian 
as  he  was  a  "  Brahmin,"  to  use  his  own 
name  for  the  thing,  with  just  that  dimin 
ishing  inclusiveness  that  Henry  James 
expressed  in  saying  of  Thoreau  that  he 
was  "more  than  provincial;  he  was  pa 
rochial."  Holmes  was,  in  certain  ways, 
the  city  parallel  to  that.  It  is  seen  in 
his  consciousness  of  his  audience,  which 
is  ever  present,  in  the  dinner-talk  flavor 
of  his  prose,  in  the  local  "asides"  of  his 
108 


THE  LITERARY  AGE  OF  BOSTON 

many  occasional  poems;  he  has  not  the 
art  to  forget  himself.  Such  a  writer  is 
seldom  understood  except  by  the  gen 
eration  with  which  he  is  in  social  touch ; 
magnetism  leaves  him;  he  amuses  his 
own  time  with  a  brilliant  mental  vivac 
ity,  but  there  it  ends. 

Whittier  was  the  opposite  of  Holmes; 
he  was  the  poet  of  the  plain  people,  born 
among  them  and  never  parting  com 
pany  by  virtue  of  education  or  that  sort 
of  growth  which  involves  a  change  in 
social  surroundings.  His  Quaker  blood 
distinguished  him  from  the  others,  who 
were  all  Unitarians;  but  the  distinction 
is  illusory,  for  "his  Quakerism  did  for  him 
precisely  what  Unitarianism  did  for 
them  in  giving  mildness  and  breadth  to 
his  religious  spirit.  It  is  by  his  piety 
that  he  most  appeals  now  to  the  general 
heart ;  by  his  reminiscences  of  the  out- 
109 


AMERICA   IN    LITERATURE 

ward  form  of  New  England  country- 
life  and  its  domestic  types,  as  in  Snow 
bound,  he  came  near  to  the  homes  of 
the  community  as  a  whole,  while  as  the 
antislavery  poet  he  held  a  specific  and 
historic  place  in  the  life  of  the  times; 
the  three  strains  of  interest,  especially 
when  felt  through  the  medium  of  his 
simple  goodness,  preserve  his  fame; 
moreover,  as  a  people's  poet,  whose 
humble  manhood  remained  unspoiled, 
he  is  assured  of  long  memory.  As  a  type 
of  character  he  was  as  appropriate  for 
the  country  as  Holmes  was  for  the  city ; 
though  both  are  high  types,  and  though 
it  seems  paradoxical,  Whittier  had  vast 
ly  the  greater  range.  Both  were  deeply 
rooted  in  the  soil,  and  had  native  history 
in  their  blood;  both,  too,  were  provincial 
in  a  way  that  their  three  great  contem 
poraries  were  not. 

no 


THE  LITERARY  AGE  OF  BOSTON 

In  the  case  of  Lowell  there  is  still 
something  enigmatic.  He  was  younger 
than  the  others;  he  was  more  complex 
in  nature,  and  changed  more  from 
youth  to  age  and  even  late  in  life.  He 
alone  owed  much  of  his  public  recogni 
tion  to  the  accident  of  office.  He  can 
not  take  his  own  place  in  literature  until, 
like  Irving,  he  is  forgotten  as  an  ambas 
sador.  He  came  of  Unitarian  ancestry, 
like  Emerson;  he  was  bred  on  the  same 
studies  as  Longfellow,  whom  he  succeed 
ed  as  a  scholar;  he  developed  criticism, 
but  did  not  relinquish  poetry ;  he  did  not 
work  hard  at  either  prose  or  verse.  The 
Biglow  Papers  is  his  most  original  work, 
racy  of  the  soil  and  the  times,  in  its 
homelier  sphere  as  native  a  product 
of  the  practical  as  Donatello  is  of  the 
spiritual  temper  of  that  breed  of  men. 
The  Commemoration  Ode  is  his  loftiest 
in 


AMERICA    IN    LITERATURE 

achievement.  He  was  the  poet  of  the 
civil  war  in  a  sense  not  so  true  of  any 
of  the  four  older  poets.  He  lived  in  a 
Harvard  atmosphere  all  his  life,  but  no 
man  was  less  academic.  His  prose  came 
mainly  from  his  brain,  and  is  of  a  transi 
tory  nature,  and  steadily  grows  less  in 
teresting.  These  seem  the  main  facts 
about  him.  He  now  seems  essentially 
a  man  of  letters,  of  high  endowments, 
having  the  accomplishment  of  verse 
with  his  many  other  rich  and  varied 
gifts,  and  no  more  than  that.  It  would 
appear  that  the  inspiration  that  gave  us 
Emerson,  Longfellow,  and  Hawthorne 
had  already  begun  to  fail,  and  beat  with 
a  lowered  pulse  in  the  youngest  and  last 
of  the  group. 

It  becomes  plain  on  looking  back  that 
the  literary  age  of  Boston  was  before  the 
civil  war.  With  the  exception  of  Low- 


112 


THE  LITERARY  AGE  OF  BOSTON 

ell — and  this  helps  to  explain  his  posi 
tion — the  character  of  these  men  was 
formed  and  their  work  completely  de 
termined  before  1860,  and  most  of  it 
was  done.  It  was  all  the  aftermath  of 
Puritanism  in  literature.  The  debt  it 
owed  to  Unitarianism  is  clear;  its  direct 
and  indirect  obligation  to  Harvard  Col 
lege,  though  but  partially  set  forth,  is 
obviously  great,  and  just  as  clearly  was 
due  to  the  old  humanities  as  there 
taught.  In  forty  years  we  have  drifted 
further  perhaps  than  any  of  us  have 
thought  from  the  conditions  and  influ 
ences  that  gave  our  country  so  large  a 
part  of  its  literary  distinction. 


THE    SOUTH 

THE  South  has  from  the  beginning 
contained,  in  the  mass,  a  peculiar 
people.  The  special  traits  of  its  literary 
history  are  not  wholly  explained  by  the 
statement,  so  often  made,  that  there  co 
lonial  conditions  of  life  continued  until 
the  social  dissolution  brought  about  by 
the  civil  war,  and  that  colonial  con 
ditions,  as  has  been  seen,  did  not  in  the 
North  result  in  original  literature.  Much 
that  was  favorable  to  literary  develop 
ment  existed  in  the  South  from  the 
formation  of  the  Union  onward.  The 
aspects  of  natural  scenery  there,  pict- 
114 


THE   SOUTH 

uresque,  luxuriant,  novel,  with  features 
of  moorland  and  mountain,  of  lowland 
and  upland,  of  river  and  coast,  of  rice 
and  cotton  culture,  of  swamp,  bayou, 
and  sand,  of  a  bird  and  flower  world  of 
marvellous  brilliancy  and  music,  of  an 
atmosphere  and  climate  clothing  the 
night  and  day  and  the  seasons  of  the 
stars  in  new  garments  of  sensibility  and 
suggestion — all  this  was  like  a  new 
theme  and  school  to  the  poet  who 
should  chance  to  be  born  there.  The 
human  history  of  the  States,  too,  with 
its  racial  features  of  mingled  Gallic  and 
Scotch  strains  in  the  blood  of  the  coun 
try,  with  its  adventurous  conquest  of 
the  land  beyond  the  mountains  and 
about  the  mouths  of  the  Mississippi, 
with  its  border  traditions,  was  both 
various  and  exciting  to  the  imagina 
tion,  hardly  less  than  was  the  open  air 


AMERICA    IN    LITERATURE 

of  the  plains  or  the  fascination  of  the 
Golden  Gate  in  the  West.  The  histori 
cal  culture  of  the  past  gave  a  starting- 
point;  education,  books,  travel  were  to 
be  found  in  a  leisure  class,  who  were 
the  masters  of  the  land.  The  power  of 
nature,  the  power  of  race,  and  the  pow 
er  of  the  transmitted  civilization  of  older 
times  were  not  lacking ;  there  was  even  a 
radiating  centre.  Virginia,  in  what  was 
its  great  age,  offered  fair  hope  of  true 
leadership  in  the  supreme  functions  of 
national  life.  The  group  of  the  Revo 
lution,  which  has  made  the  State  illus 
trious  in  history,  lasted  far  on  into  the 
next  age,  and  was  distinguished  not 
only  by  individual  force,  but  by  an  en 
lightenment  and  generosity  of  mind  of 
the  happiest  promise.  Jefferson,  in  par 
ticular,  who  was  the  one  great  dream 
er  ever  born  in  this  land,  was  well  fitted 
116 


THE    SOUTH 

to  be  not  only  the  fountain-head  of  a 
Declaration  and  of  a  University,  but  of  a 
literature;  or,  if  not  the  fountain-head, 
he,  at  least,  held  the  rod  to  smite  the 
rock.  It  is,  perhaps,  forgotten  that  in 
the  fall  of  1776  Jefferson,  in  association 
with  four  other  Virginian  gentlemen, 
proposed  a  general  system  of  law  in 
which  one  measure  was  for  the  diffusion 
of  knowledge  among  the  people.  It  is 
thus  described: 

"  After  a  preamble,  in  which  the  im 
portance  of  the  subject  to  the  Republic 
is  most  ably  and  eloquently  announced, 
the  bill  proposes  a  simple  and  beauti 
ful  scheme  whereby  science  (like  justice 
under  the  institutions  of  our  Alfred) 
would  have  been  carried  to  every  man's 
door.  Genius,  instead  of  having  to  break 
its  way  through  the  thick,  opposing 
clouds  of  native  obscurity,  indigence, 


AMERICA    IN    LITERATURE 

and  ignorance,  was  to  be  sought  for 
through  every  family  in  the  common 
wealth;  the  sacred  spark,  wherever  it 
was  detected,  was  to  be  tenderly  cher 
ished,  fed,  and  fanned  into  a  flame;  its 
innate  properties  and  tendencies  were  to 
be  developed  and  examined,  and  then 
cautiously  and  judiciously  invested  with 
all  the  auxiliary  energy  and  radiance 
of  which  its  character  was  susceptible. 
What  a  plan  was  here  to  give  stability 
and  solid  glory  to  the  Republic!" 

It  was  surely  a  generous  dream  of  these 
five  Virginian  gentlemen,  and  shows  the 
spirit  and  outlook  of  that  enthusiastic 
and  public-spirited  age  in  the  Old  Do 
minion.  But,  none  the  less,  it  was  the 
light  of  a  false  dawn.  Public  spirit  died 
out  in  Virginia  before  these  men  were 
dead. 

What  was  it  that  sterilized  the  fresh 
118 


THE    SOUTH 

strength  of  the  young  nation  in  its  fair 
est  poetic  region?  The  commonplace 
is  to  say  that  it  was  the  institution  of 
slavery;  and,  however  far  the  analysis 
be  pressed,  it  does  not  really  escape  from 
this  answer,  from  the  repeated  burden  of 
all  lands  and  climates  that  genius,  the 
higher  life  of  man,  withers  in  the  air  of 
social  tyranny.  Slavery  is  a  mutual 
bond;  to  a  true  and  impartial  eye  the 
masters  are  also  caught  and  bound  in 
the  same  chains  with  the  slaves.  Cer 
tain  it  is  that  literature  in  any  proper 
sense  ceased  even  to  be  hoped  for,  and 
ceased  also  to  be  respected  as  one  of  the 
vital  elements  of  national  life. 

It  is  curious  to  observe  that  what  the 
South  afforded  to  general  literature,  in 
the  main,  was  given  into  the  hands 
of  strangers.  There  was  an  interesting 
plantation  life  in  Virginia  on  great  es- 
119 


AMERICA   IN    LITERATURE 

tates,  pre-Revolutionary,  and  not  dis 
similar  in  certain  aspects  to  the  life  of 
the  great  Tory  houses  of  the  North,  and 
of  these  latter  no  trace  in  literature 
survives;  but  the  Virginian  record  was 
written  by  Thackeray's  imagination. 
There  was  in  the  South  of  later  days  the 
great  theme  of  slavery  itself,  a  varied 
and  mighty  theme  even  before  the  civil 
war  gave  it  epical  range;  in  those  days 
it  was  still  only  a  story  of  individual 
human  lives,  but  it  was  written  in 
Uncle  Tom's  Cabin,  the  one  book  by 
which  the  old  South  survives  in  litera 
ture,  for  better  or  worse.  Characteristic 
Southern  scenery  added  more  to  Whit- 
tier's  verse  than  to  that  of  any  poet  of 
its  own  soil.  It  will  also,  perhaps,  be 
regarded  as  curious,  though  not  the  less 
true,  to  observe  that  such  literature  as 
the  South  produced  by  native  writers  is 


THE   SOUTH 

so  intimately  connected  with  the  national 
life  that  the  closeness  of  its  relation 
thereto  is,  broadly  speaking,  the  meas 
ure  of  its  vitality.  This  is  plainly  the 
case  in  so  far  as  the  intellectual  vigor  of 
the  South  was  confined  to  legal  and 
political  channels,  and  found  its  chief 
outlet  in  the  national  councils  through 
argument  and  oratory;  and  this  is  the 
chief  part  of  the  matter.  But  it  is  also 
true  of  such  a  writer  of  the  imagination 
as  Simms,  the  most  distinguished  prose 
author  of  the  South  and  typical  of  its 
middle  period,  who  found  his  best 
themes  in  national  episodes;  and  it  is 
true  of  Poe,  the  sole  writer  of  the  first 
rank,  whose  popularity  and  appeal  were 
always  in  the  mid-stream  of  contem 
porary  national  production,  who  lived 
in  the  national  literary  market-places, 
and  entered  into  his  fame  by  prevailing 


AMERICA    IN    LITERATURE 

with  the  readers  of  the  magazines  and 
books  of  the  national  public.  The  colo 
nial  dependence  of  the  South  in  literary 
matters  was  not  on  Europe,  but  on  the 
North;  its  literature  took  up  a  provin 
cial  relation  thereto;  its  authors  emi 
grated,  mentally  and  often  bodily, 
thither;  in  other  words,  Southern  litera 
ture  does  not  exist,  in  any  of  its  forms, 
political,  fictional,  or  poetic,  except  in 
relation  to  the  national  idea,  either  as 
its  product  or  as  the  result  of  reaction 
from  it.  The  nation  was  the  parent  of 
all  the  higher  activity  of  the  mind  of  the 
South,  fostered,  sustained,  and  pros 
pered  it,  even  when  that  activity  was 
directed  against  itself.  There  is  noth 
ing  exceptional  in  this,  for  it  belongs 
to  the  nature  of  literature  to  flourish 
where  the  social  life  of  the  community 
is  largest,  most  vital,  and  culminative. 

122 


THE   SOUTH 

The  decadence  of  the  cultivated  in 
tellectual  life  of  Virginia — and  in  that 
State  alone  did  it  exist  in  a  virile  con 
dition — was  coincident  with  the  declin 
ing  years  of  Jefferson  and  his  great  asso 
ciates  ;  but  it  did  not  take  place  without 
the  continuing  presence  of  the  older  and 
nobler  ideals.  The  man  in  whom  these 
were  conspicuous,  and  who  best  repre 
sents  what  was  most  humane,  enlight 
ened,  and  fairest  in  the  community,  was 
William  Wirt,  now  almost  a  forgotten 
name.  He  was  primarily  a  man  of  the 
law,  though  distinguished  as  much  for 
eloquence  as  for  argument  and  reason 
ing;  he  had,  besides,  a  certain  dignity  of 
mind.  He  was  of  the  next  generation 
after  the  Revolutionary  fathers,  and  in 
him  one  feels  the  after-glow  of  a  great 
time.  He  was  still  in  touch  with  Eng 
lish  literary  tradition,  and  occasionally 
123 


AMERICA   IN   LITERATURE 

ventured  on  works  beyond  the  view  and 
interests  of  the  law,  the  fruits  of  that 
true  liberal  education  which  he  possess 
ed.  The  Letters  of  the  British  Spy  was 
his  most  significant  book,  a  little  work, 
and  in  itself  of  very  trifling  importance, 
but  sufficient  in  its  own  day  to  win  rep 
utation  akin  to  literary  fame.  What  it 
discloses  now  to  the  rare  reader  of  its 
pages  is  the  mind  of  a  Virginian  of  that 
generation,  perhaps  the  best  mind.  The 
eighteenth  century  still  rules  in  it,  not 
merely  in  the  form  and  method,  but  in 
the  weight  of  the  thought,  the  close, 
compact,  accurate  expression  of  the 
sense,  the  worth  of  the  reflections;  it  is, 
in  other  words,  intellectual  in  precisely 
the  same  way  that  Burke  is  intellectual. 
Still  more  striking,  to  one  who  attempts 
to  place  the  book,  the  type  of  mind,  the 
culture  of  the  understanding,  in  time,  is 
124 


THE   SOUTH 

the  old-fashioned  classicism  of  the 
writer.  This  classicism  was  distinctly 
a  Southern  trait;  not  that  it  was  not 
found  elsewhere,  but  that  in  the  South 
it  was  prized  more  dearly  and  lasted  long 
er  than  elsewhere.  The  place  where  the 
eighteenth  century  finally  died  was  the 
South;  and  this  mind  of  William  Wirt 
was,  perhaps,  the  last  recognizable  Eng 
lish  mind  where  it  burned  or  flickered. 
The  advice  that  he  gives  to  some  young 
aspirant  to  cultivate  facility  in  quoting 
from  Latin  authors,  because  it  is  agree 
able  to  the  Supreme  Court,  has  a  pleas 
ant  flavor  of  age.  He  was  himself  fa 
miliar  with  such  classics,  and  with  Eng 
lish  writers  like  Boyle.  These  books  of 
a  large  masculine  stamp  had  formed  his 
mind,  and  they  live  in  his  respect  and 
affection.  A  predominant  interest  in 
oratory  is  noticeable,  not  as  it  is  to-day, 
125 


AMERICA    IN    LITERATURE 

but  the  Ciceronian,  Demosthenic  stripe, 
the  oratory  of  the  British  Parliament, 
by  which  one  comes  vividly  near  to 
Patrick  Henry  in  the  past,  and  under 
stands  better  Calhoun  and  Webster  in 
their  turn.  It  is  all  gone  now — the 
eighteenth  century,  the  classicism,  ora 
tory,  and  all;  and  the  shadow  of  it  no 
longer  remains  at  Washington.  But  it 
is  clear  that,  save  that  there  is  here  a 
legal  mind  interested  in  the  solid  think 
ing  of  Burke,  Boyle,  and  Franklin,  this 
is  the  parallel  in  Virginia  to  what  Irving 
was  in  New  York,  himself  by  literary 
affiliation  nearer  to  Addison  and  Gold 
smith.  Wirt  was  the  companion  figure 
to  Irving,  and  marks  the  contempora 
neousness  of  the  eighteenth  century 
growing  moribund  in  both  of  these  colo 
nials;  yet  both,  too,  are  sharers  in  the 
new  life  of  the  new  land.  Irving  passed 
126 


THE    SOUTH 

through  the  purgation  and  enlargement 
of  long  foreign  residence,  and  his  genius 
developed  by  virtue  of  a  pure  original 
literary  gift,  and  he  was  continually  a 
more  accomplished  writer,  and  finally 
made  a  great  American  name;  Wirt,  the 
national  lawyer,  remained  in  the  sur 
roundings  amid  which  he  was  reared, 
and  added  nothing  to  what  he  had  in 
herited  from  the  literary  past. 

The  society  of  Virginia  in  that  genera 
tion  is  very  clearly  seen  in  Wirt's  lively 
sketches  of  figures  of  the  bar,  and  in  the 
tone  and  substance  of  his  correspond 
ence.  The  mental  strength  of  the  men, 
and  the  original  peculiarities  of  their 
character,  are  such  as  belong  to  annals 
of  the  bar  everywhere;  the  circuit  ac 
quaintance  of  Lincoln,  or  of  Choate, 
bears  the  same  general  stamp;  but  one 
is  made  aware  of  a  classic  tradition  of 
127 


AMERICA    IN    LITERATURE 

composition  and  delivery,  and  also  of  a 
mode  of  life,  in  Wirt's  sphere  which  are 
distinctive,  and  which  are  recognized  as 
Virginia  traits.  Any  discussion  of  Vir 
ginia  matters  finally  turns  to  a  descrip 
tion  of  the  social  life,  which  was  the 
pride  of  the  State  and  its  chief  pleasure. 
If  books  were  to  be  written  there,  this 
would  naturally  be  the  subject.  It  was 
Kennedy,  of  Maryland,  the  friend  and 
biographer  of  Wirt,  who  utilized  this 
material,  and  thereby  became  the  rep 
resentative  of  intellectual  taste,  culture, 
and  achievement,  for  his  generation,  in 
much  the  same  way  as  Wirt  had  been  in 
the  former  time,  so  far  as  literary  re 
membrance  is  concerned.  He  was  a 
gentleman  of  the  same  classical  breed 
ing,  and  of  similar  affiliations  with  the 
eighteenth  century;  but  he  was  also 
more  powerfully  and  directly  affected  by 
128 


THE    SOUTH 

Irving's  example  and  success.  He  un 
dertook,  in  the  leisure  of  a  legal  and 
political  life,  to  portray  the  scenes,  inci 
dents,  and  characters  of  a  Virginia  plan 
tation  in  Swallow  Barn,  with  a  sketchy 
and  rambling  pen;  and  he  succeeded  in 
producing  a  little  Virginia  classic.  The 
book  is  essentially  on  the  level  of  Mrs. 
Stowe's  Old  Town  Folks,  and  similar 
provincial  pictures  of  old  country  peo 
ple,  except  that  the  touch  is  finer,  and 
especially  there  is  the  pervading  sense 
of  literary  reminiscence  in  the  narrative 
declaring  its  kinship  with  masterly  lit 
erature  of  the  past.  Swallow  Barn  is, 
in  effect,  something  between  the  Rog 
er  de  Coverley  Papers  and  Waverley, 
with  Irving  as  the  interpreter,  the  au 
thor's  guide  and  friend.  It  is  a  nonde 
script  tale,  made  up  of  plantation  scenes, 
genteel  comedy,  rural  realism,  figures 

9  129 


AMERICA    IN    LITERATURE 

from  all  conditions  of  life,  crude  super 
stitious  tales,  humors  of  the  law,  and 
one  thing  and  another  that  a  visitor 
might  observe  and  set  down  as  notes 
of  a  residence  in  the  district.  Typical 
Southern  character  of  several  varieties 
abounds  in  its  pages.  Yet  as  a  literary 
description  of  the  society  it  attempts 
to  depict,  it  falls  far  short  of  any  ex 
cellence  which  would  allow  it  to  be 
placed  in  the  class  to  which  it  aspires. 
Nor  in  his  other  writings  does  Kennedy 
succeed  in  making  himself  a  man  of 
letters.  His  books  are  entertaining,  as 
diaries  and  travellers'  tales  please  the 
reader,  but  not  after  the  style  and  fash 
ion  of  imaginative  writers.  It  is  rather 
the  author  himself  who  is  significant, 
the  refined  and  amiable  gentleman 
whose  taste  is  for  literary  elegance,  and 
whose  capacity  to  write  is  rather  one  of 
130 


THE    SOUTH 

his  mild  accomplishments  than  an  orig 
inal  gift,  but  whose  title  to  rank  as  the 
representative  of  his  community  in  let 
ters  is  indisputable.  A  fine  representa 
tive  he  is,  too;  one  who  would  have 
graced  any  literary  coterie  of  the  Eng 
lish  world;  but  a  man  of  instincts  and 
tastes,  of  sympathetic  warmth  and  kind 
ly  humorousness,  of  sweet  behavior, 
rather  than  a  man  of  powers.  He 
stands  practically  alone,  too;  for  Beverly 
Tucker,  though  of  a  similar  sphere,  and 
following  Cooper  instead  of  Irving,  has  a 
much  laxer  hold  on  remembrance.  In 
these  men  the  emasculated  tradition 
of  the  eighteenth  century,  though  rein 
forced  by  the  fresh  vigor  of  Irving's  and 
Cooper's  success  with  American  sub 
jects,  died  out;  and  Virginia  life,  never 
virile  in  imaginative  creation,  became 
very  slightly  receptive  even  of  the  mod- 
131 


AMERICA    IN    LITERATURE 

era  writers,  though  the  Georgian  poets, 
and  especially  Byron  and  Moore,  were 
somewhat  known. 

The  best  gauge  of  the  literary  vitality 
of  the  South  towards  the  middle  of  the 
century  is  the  magazine  which  White 
founded  at  Richmond,  The  Southern 
Literary  Messenger.  The  mere  fact  that 
this  periodical  was  started  testifies  to 
the  presence  of  intellectual  interests  in 
the  community.  Education  of  the  sort 
befitting  a  young  gentleman  of  the  day 
was  provided  for  the  youth  of  the  ruling 
class  by  private  tutors,  by  travel,  by 
residence  at  Yale  or  Harvard,  or  else 
where  in  the  North,  and  by  the  home 
University  of  Virginia.  This  last  in 
stitution,  the  work  of  Jefferson's  foresee 
ing  mind,  never  ceased  to  be  one  of  the 
great  schools  of  the  nation.  If  its  power 
and  rank  were  to  be  measured  by  equip- 
132 


THE   SOUTH 

ment  after  our  present  materialistic 
fashion,  they  might  seem  little  enough; 
but  if  they  are  judged  rather  by  the 
number  and  quality  of  the  minds  there 
educated,  by  the  leadership  of  such 
minds  in  the  State  and  nation,  by  the 
spread  of  their  influence  through  the 
farther  South  and  Southwest,  the  effi 
cient  force  of  the  University  must  be 
highly  rated  as  a  factor  in  society.  None 
of  its  students  ever  lost  the  impress  of 
its  classical  studies  and  its  standards 
of  behavior.  Poe,  for  example,  shows  in 
his  writings  more  traces  of  his  school 
ing  than  any  other  American  author. 
Undoubtedly,  the  University  is  to  be 
credited  with  the  formation  of  the  in 
tellectual  habit  of  the  South,  and  its 
work  was  rather  supplemented  than  dis 
placed  by  foreign  residence. 

The  Richmond  magazine  was  essen- 
133 


AMERICA    IN    LITERATURE 

tially  dependent  on  this  body  of  Univer 
sity  men  and  their  friends  throughout 
the  South.  It  would  be,  nevertheless, 
a  wild  hyberbole  to  describe  these  men 
and  their  families  as  a  reading  class ;  there 
was,  properly  speaking,  no  public  at  the 
South.  The  contents  of  the  magazine, 
if  Poe's  exceptional  work  in  its  first  two 
years  be  excluded,  though  not  compar 
ing  unfavorably  with  its  rivals  elsewhere, 
are  exceedingly  tame  and  dreary.  Local 
pride  is  much  in  evidence,  and  the  pres 
ence  of  provincial  reputations  is  acute 
ly  felt;  but  of  literature  there  is  truly 
not  a  trace.  No  democracy  ever  bred 
such  a  mediocrity  of  talent  as  this  aristo 
cratically  constructed  society.  For  one 
thing — and  it  is  true  of  the  whole  liter 
ary  past  of  the  South — there  is  no  in 
terest  in  ideas;  there  are  no  ideas.  There 
had  been  a  time  when  Voltaire  was  much 
134 


THE   SOUTH 

read  in  Virginia,  though  the  traces  of  it 
are  now  wellnigh  lost  in  the  dust -heap, 
and  there  had  been  radical  thinking  by 
young  men;  but  no  one  came  after  Vol 
taire.  Perhaps  this  is  the  fundamental 
trouble,  after  all;  for  how  can  literature 
flourish  in  the  absence  of  ideas?  The 
banality  of  the  question  indicates  the 
poverty  of  the  situation.  A  classical 
upbringing  on  Horace,  a  library  of  The 
Spectator,  Waverley,  and  Moore's  Poems, 
taken  in  connection  with  even  the  best 
endeavor  to  achieve  Ciceronianism  or 
Addisonianism  or  any  other  imitatively 
perfect  style,  could  not  accomplish 
much  by  themselves.  An  air  without 
ideas  is  the  deadliest  of  literary  atmos 
pheres.  This  was  perhaps  less  thor 
oughly  true  of  Virginia  than  of  the 
farther  South,  where  political  passion 
was  more  absorbing  as  time  swung 
135 


AMERICA   IN   LITERATURE 

grimly  on.  The  great  age  of  Virginia 
culminating  in  the  glory  of  her  Presi 
dents  had  gone  by,  and  a  less  strenuous 
race  had  succeeded;  but  the  men  of 
South  Carolina  were  stronger  than  their 
fathers  had  been,  and  the  climax  of  her 
great  age  was  to  be  in  the  civil  war, 
towards  which  her  social  force  moved 
for  a  generation  with  towering  pride  and 
fatal  certainty.  Yet  one  does  not  find 
about  Calhoun  an  intellectual  group, 
nor  is  there  anywhere  about  the  states 
men  of  the  Secession  that  air  of  letters 
and  philosophy  and  the  higher  interests 
of  man  which  was  so  marked  a  feature 
of  the  Revolutionary  time.  The  liter 
ary  state  of  this  later  period  is  most 
fully  and  characteristically  shown,  as  is 
natural,  in  South  Carolina  itself,  the 
true  seat  of  Southern  power  then;  but 
the  lowness  of  the  ebb  is  keenly  apparent 

136 


THE   SOUTH 

in  the  fact  that  the  illustrative  author  is 
so  inferior  a  man  as  Simms. 

Simms  was  of  Irish  extraction,  to 
which  was  due  his  literary  gift,  and  the 
strain  in  him  was  one  of  recent  immigra 
tion.  The  South  had  little  part  in  his 
making,  and  gave  him  in  the  main  no 
more  than  an  environment  and  the  nu 
cleus  of  a  fierce  local  patriotism.  He 
was  not  one  of  the  ruling  class,  but  the 
child  of  an  adventurer  who  himself 
found  Charleston  unendurable,  and  went 
farther  into  the  Southwest  to  find  a 
home  and  a  living.  Simms  remained 
behind  and  grew  up  in  the  neighbor 
hood  of  the  traditions  of  the  Revolution 
and  the  backwoodsmen.  He  was  a 
man  of  overflowing  animal  force,  self- 
assertive,  ambitious,  destined  to  be  self- 
made.  He  had  poetical  susceptibility 
and  dreaming  faculty,  a  Celtic  base  in 
137 


AMERICA    IN    LITERATURE 

him,  which  led  him  to  the  composition 
of  facile  and  feeble  poems;  hut  drifting 
off  into  fiction,  as  he  tried  his  hand  at  all 
kinds  of  writing,  he  finally  produced, 
amid  the  voluminous  output,  a  few  colo 
nial  romances  by  which  he  made  a  more 
lasting  impression.  They  lack  those 
qualities  which  make  literature  of  a  book, 
but  they  survive  by  virtue  of  their  raw 
material,  which  has  both  historical  and 
human  truth;  and  in  certain  episodes 
and  scenes  he  shows  narrative  and  even 
dramatic  power.  He  followed  in  Coo 
per's  track  in  these  tales,  and  chose  the 
American  subject  near  to  him  in  the  life 
of  his  part  of  the  country  in  the  preced 
ing  generations  of  its  conquest  from  the 
Indian  and  the  Briton.  The  tales  will, 
therefore,  always  retain  a  certain  im 
portance  as  a  picture  of  social  conditions 
and  warfare.  He,  nevertheless,  did  not 

138 


THE    SOUTH 

find  himself  accepted  and  honored  in  his 
own  community.  He  made  several 
journeys  to  the  North,  and  had  many 
friends  among  the  literary  men  there, 
and  published  his  books  there.  The 
North  was  his  outlet  into  the  world  of 
letters. 

In  South  Carolina  it  was  felt  that 
such  a  man  as  Legare*  was  the  proper 
representative  of  Southern  culture.  Lit 
erary  taste  still  clung  to  the  library; 
it  has  the  conservatism  of  the  school- 
reader,  and  never  passed  the  nonage  of 
a  good  classical  pupil.  Contemporary 
literature,  with  romantic  and  realistic 
vigor,  however  closely  allied  to  the  mas 
ters  of  the  North,  had  no  vogue.  It  was 
considered  that  a  Southern  literature 
was  impossible.  The  foolishness  of 
Chivers  testifies  to  that  in  Georgia  no 
less  than  the  powerful  irascibility  of 
139 


AMERICA    IN   LITERATURE 

Simms  in  South  Carolina.  Yet,  with 
wonderful  persistency,  magazine  after 
magazine  was  launched  at  Charleston, 
had  its  callow  years  of  feebleness,  and 
died.  It  seemed  not  only  that  the  South 
could  produce  nothing  of  itself;  what 
came  to  it  from  contact  with  the  larger 
world  of  English  speech  could  not  take 
root  in  that  soil.  A  few  books  of  humor, 
long  ago  extinct,  may  be  excepted;  but, 
save  for  these,  the  condition  of  the  coun 
try  beyond  Charleston  was  like  that  of 
the  Ohio  valley  and  the  Iowa  prairie  in 
literary  destitution.  Even  in  New  Or 
leans,  now  an  old  city,  there  was  less  of 
literature  than  in  Charleston  itself. 

It  is  sometimes  suggested  that  this 
blight  which  fell  on  the  literary  spirit 
every  where  in  the  South  affected  not  only 
the  reception  of  books  actually  written, 
but  also  the  development  of  such  minds 
140 


THE   SOUTH 

of  literary  capacity  as  were  born  in  the 
community;  that  there  was  a  discour 
agement  of  genius  itself  in  the  fact 
that  while  literature  in  common  with  all 
the  fine  arts  requires  an  open  career  and 
honor  for  the  poorest  in  social  position 
and  opportunity,  here  fixed  aristocratic 
prejudice  and  materialistic  self-satis 
faction  and  the  vanity  and  indifference 
that  belong  everywhere  to  irresponsible 
wealth,  made  success  impossible.  How 
ever  that  may  be,  it  is  clear  that  litera 
ture  in  the  South  had  by  the  time  of  the 
civil  war  become  dead.  The  position 
of  Simms  as  the  representative  and  cen 
tral  figure  of  the  literary  life  there  is 
made  the  more  prominent  by  the  com 
panionship  of  younger  men  in  his  latter 
days;  of  Timrod,  like  the  whippoorwill, 
a  thin,  pathetic,  twilight  note,  and  of 
Hayne,  whom  one  would  rather  liken  to 
141 


AMERICA    IN    LITERATURE 

the  mocking-bird,  except  that  it  does  no 
kind  of  justice  to  the  bird.  With  them 
the  literature  of  the  old  South  ceased. 

There  remains  the  solitary  figure  of 
Poe,  the  one  genius  of  the  highest  Amer 
ican  rank,  who  belongs  to  the  South. 
It  is  common  to  deny  that  he  was  dis 
tinctively  a  Southern  writer,  not  so  much 
on  the  score  of  his  birth  at  Boston  as 
because  he  is  described  as  a  world-artist, 
unrelated  to  his  local  origin,  unindebted 
to  it,  and  existing  in  a  cosmopolitan 
limbo,  denationalized,  almost  dehuman 
ized.  But  mortal  genius  always  roots 
in  the  soil,  and  is  influenced  and  usually 
shaped  by  its  environment  of  birth,  edu 
cation,  and  opportunity.  It  appears  to 
me  that  Poe  is  as  much  a  product  of  the 
South  as  Whittier  is  of  New  England. 
His  breeding  and  education  were  South 
ern;  his  manners,  habits  of  thought,  and 
142 


THE    SOUTH 

moods  of  feeling  were  Southern ;  his  sen 
timent  alism,  his  conception  of  woman 
hood  and  its  qualities,  of  manhood  and 
its  behavior,  his  weaknesses  of  character, 
bore  the  stamp  of  his  origin;  his  tem 
perament  even,  his  sensibility,  his  gloom 
and  dream,  his  response  to  color  and 
music,  were  of  his  race  and  place.  It  is 
true  that  he  was  not  accepted  during  his 
life  by  the  society  of  Richmond  any  more 
than  was  Simms  by  the  aristocracy  of 
Charleston.  But  the  indifference  of  an 
aristocratic  society  to  men  of  letters  not 
in  its  own  set  is  no  new  thing ;  it  belongs 
to  the  nature  of  such  society  the  world 
over.  It  is  more  germane  to  observe 
that  Poe's  education,  the  books  on  which 
he  fed,  gives  us  the  best  and  fullest  evi 
dence  available  as  to  the  kind  and  de 
gree  of  literary  culture  possible  to  any 
Virginia  youth  of  talent,  and  its  range 


AMERICA   IN    LITERATURE 

and  quality  serve  to  modify  our  idea  as 
to  the  nature  of  that  culture  in  the 
South,  and  lead  us  to  a  broader  and  truer 
conception  of  intellectual  conditions 
there. 

It  does  not  appear  that  Poe  in  his 
early  education  or  in  the  accessibility 
of  books  during  his  first  manhood  was 
at  any  disadvantage  with  his  contem 
poraries  in  the  North ;  the  difference  be 
tween  him  and  his  Southern  compatriots 
was  that  he  made  the  fullest  use  of  his 
opportunities.  He  fed  on  Byron,  Moore, 
and  Coleridge,  and  as  he  went  on  in 
years  he  was  among  the  first  to  hail 
Tennyson  and  the  later  writers,  in  prose 
as  well  as  verse,  and  he  always  kept  pace 
with  contemporaneous  productions.  He 
did  this  before  he  left  the  South,  as  well 
as  afterwards.  He  stands  out  from  the 
rest  because  he  had  the  power  of  genius, 
144 


THE   SOUTH 

and  was  not,  like  Simms,  a  man  of  talent 
merely.  When  he  came  to  the  North, 
where  he  spent  his  mature  life,  he 
brought  his  Southern  endowment  with 
him.  His  relations  with  women  were 
still  sentimental;  his  attitude  to  men, 
his  warm  and  frank  courtesies  to  friends, 
his  bitter  angers  towards  others,  his 
speech,  garb,  and  demeanor  denoted  his 
extraction.  No  stranger  meeting  him 
could  have  failed  to  recognize  him  as  a 
Southerner.  He  always  lived  in  the 
North  as  an  alien,  somewhat  on  his 
guard,  somewhat  contemptuous  of  his 
surroundings,  always  homesick  for  the 
place  that  he  well  knew  would  know  him 
no  more  though  he  were  to  return  to  it. 
In  his  letters,  in  his  conversations,  in  all 
reminiscences  of  him,  this  mark  of  the 
South  on  him  is  as  plain  as  in  his  color, 
features,  and  personal  bearing. 
i»  145 


AMERICA    IN    LITERATURE 

But,  though  this  be  granted,  and  there 
is  no  gainsaying  it,  it  is  universally  main 
tained  that  his  genius  was  destitute  of 
any  local  attachment.  I  shall  hardly 
do  more  than  suggest  a  contrary  view. 
In  one  respect,  indeed,  he  seems  wholly 
apart  from  the  South.  He  was  a  critic, 
with  well  -  reasoned  standards  of  taste 
and  art.  The  South  is  uncritical.  The 
power  of  criticism,  which  was  one  of  the 
prime  forces  of  modern  thought  in  the 
last  century,  never  penetrated  the 
South.  There  was  never  any  place 
there,  nor  is  there  now,  for  minorities  of 
opinion,  and  still  less  for  individual  pro 
test,  for  germinating  reform,  for  frank 
expression  of  a  view  differing  from  that 
of  the  community.  In  this  respect  the 
South  was  as  much  cut  off  from  the  mod 
ern  world,  and  still  is,  as  Ireland  is  from 
England  in  other  ways.  It  lies  outside  the 
146 


THE   SOUTH 

current  of  the  age,  and  this  is  one  reason 
why  there  was  such  an  absence  of  ideas 
in  its  life.     Poe,  on  the  other  hand,  was 
a  critic  of  independent  mind  and  un 
sparing  expression.     Yet  it  is  noticeable 
that  he  never  criticised  a  Southern  writer 
adversely,   except   when  he  had   some 
personal   animosity.     It   is   only  to  be 
added  that  Poe  was  a  critic  who  escaped 
from  the  environment  within  whose  lim 
its  his  critical  power  would  have  been 
crushed.     But  in  his  imaginative  work, 
is  it  not  true  that  the  conception  of  char 
acter  and  incident  in  such  tales  as  Will 
iam  Wilson,  The  Assignation,  The  Cask 
of  Amontillado  are  distinctly  Southern? 
Are  not  all  his  women  in  the  romantic 
tales   elaborations   of  suggestions  from 
Southern  types?     Is  not  The  Fall  of  the 
House  of  Usher  a  Southern  tale  at  the 
core,    however  theatrically  developed? 
147 


AMERICA   IN   LITERATURE 

Poe  is  the  only  poet,  so  far  as  I  know, 
who  is  on  record  as  the  defender  of  hu 
man  slavery.  It  must  not  be  forgotten 
that  he  grew  up  in  a  slave-holding  State. 
There  are  traces  of  cruelty  in  Poe,  of  pa 
tience  with  cruelty,  easy  to  find.  The 
Black  Cat  could  not  have  been  written 
except  by  a  man  who  knew  cruelty  well 
and  was  hardened  to  it.  The  Pit  and 
the  Pendulum  belongs  in  the  same  class. 
It  is  not  any  one  of  these  items,  but  the 
mass  of  them,  that  counts.  The  mor 
bid,  melancholy,  dark,  grewsome,  terri 
ble,  in  Poe,  seem  to  me  to  be  related  to 
his  environment;  these  things  sympa 
thize  with  the  South,  in  all  lands,  with 
Italy  and  Spain ;  as  the  Spaniard  is  plain 
in  Cervantes,  it  may  well  seem  that  the 
Southerner  is  manifest  in  the  temper  of 
Poe's  imagination,  characterization,  in 
cident,  atmosphere,  and  landscape.  His 
148 


THE  SOUTH 

tendency  towards  musical  effects  is  also 
to  the  point.  So  Lanier  tried  to  ob 
tain  such  effects  from  landscape,  trees, 
and  the  marsh,  though  Poe  is  free  from 
Lanier's  emotional  phases,  in  which  he 
seems,  like  Ixion,  embracing  the  cloud. 
Such,  in  brief,  are  some  of  the  reasons 
that  may  justify  one  in  seeing  in  Poe  a 
great  expression  of  the  Southern  tem 
perament  in  letters.  He  certainly  is  the 
lone  star  of  the  South;  and  yet  it  may 
eventually  prove  that  the  song  of  Dix 
ie  is  the  most  immortal  contribution 
that  the  South  has  given  to  the  national 
literature. 


THE  WEST 


THE  West  has  ever  been  a  name  for 
romance,  for  the  place  of  discovery, 
of  the  marvels  of  nature  feeding  the  ex 
pectant  and  roused  curiosity  of  those 
who  break  in  on  great  solitudes,  of  heroic 
human  forces  put  forth  to  take  posses 
sion  and  to  go  on;  and  never  in  man's 
history  was  the  panorama  of  the  re 
treating  horizon  disclosed  so  swiftly, 
with  such  spectacular  changefulness,  as 
in  the  opening  of  the  American  conti 
nent,  when  veil  after  veil  withdrew — 
the  dense  wilderness  of  the  Genesee  and 
the  southward  timberland,  the  open 


THE   WEST 

prairies  of  the  vast  river -country,  the 
long  roll  of  the  plains  of  the  Sunflower 
trail,  the  mountains,  the  deserts,  till  at 
last,  with  descents  of  loveliness,  the 
scene  debouched  at  the  Golden  Gate  of 
the  Pacific.  Never  since  the  Hellenes 
first  looked  on  the  Mediterranean  had 
there  been  such  a  moment  of  beauty  and 
power  in  the  great  human  migration. 
Immensity  and  diversity  strove  with 
each  other  in  the  century-long  revela 
tion.  To  our  backward  look  the  land  is 
full  of  adventurous  experience ;  the  river- 
voyagers,  the  fur-traders,  the  explorers, 
the  gold-hunters  are  like  nomadic  waves 
over  it;  the  Indian  is  hardly  more  than 
an  incident,  like  antelope  and  buffalo,  so 
much  is  the  imagination  taken  with  the 
white  man's  life  in  such  surroundings. 
It  is  of  this  national  mise-en-scene,  this 
race -energy,  that  those  old-fashioned 


AMERICA   IN   LITERATURE 

writers  thought  who  used  to  demand  of 
us  a  literature  "on  the  same  scale  as  the 
country."  But  no  nation  yet  ever  pro 
duced  literature  in  the  time  of  its  settle 
ment  on  the  soil,  and  our  history  con 
forms  to  this  old  record.  The  legend- 
breeding  time  has  gone,  and  no  legend 
yet  appears;  and  in  its  place  has  come, 
all  glamour  scattered,  the  West  that  is 
built  in  the  love  of  home  more  than  in 
the  love  of  gold,  banded  by  railways, 
knotted  with  great  cities,  and  filled  far 
and  wide  with  the  peace  of  natural  labor, 
domesticity,  education;  and  the  land 
settles  to  its  rest. 

Argonaut  or  pioneer,  early  or  late,  of 
whatever  stripe  of  adventurer,  the  first 
wanderers  were  no  makers  of  books. 
The  scientific  explorers  left  important 
works  of  the  highest  interest  in  their 
sphere,  but  they  owned  neither  the  style 


THE   WEST 

nor  the  matter  of  literature.  History 
waited  for  Parkman.  The  part  that 
books  held  in  the  farms,  villages,  and 
towns  which  grew  up  in  the  settlement 
was  the  same  as  in  the  original  commu 
nities  from  which  the  emigrants  came. 
The  broad  northward  sweep  of  the  New 
England  trail  was  thick  with  the  trans 
planted  pulpit,  school,  and  ideas  of  the 
old  Puritan  coast;  the  stream  from 
Pennsylvania  and  the  Southeast  was 
less  marked  with  intellectual  traits.  Lit 
erature  was  still  an  instrument  of  the 
practical  life,  including  morality  in  that 
term;  it  fed  the  sermon,  informed  the 
political  debate,  and  gathered  especially 
about  the  newspaper  press  and  the  nu 
merous  growth  of  feeble  and  short-lived 
periodicals.  Certain  regions  were  espe 
cially  favored,  in  particular  the  country 
of  the  Western  Reserve  in  northern 
153 


AMERICA   IN   LITERATURE 

Ohio  and  a  little  tract  of  Indiana  where, 
within  a  county's  breadth,  were  born  the 
greater  number  of  Western  writers  who 
achieved  reputation  in  the  second  half 
of  the  last  century.  There  was,  too,  a 
Unitarian  outpost  at  Louisville,  in  Ken 
tucky,  and  a  literary  spirit  there  and  an 
opportunity  for  education,  which  made 
that  the  most  cultivated  city  of  the 
South  beyond  the  Alleghanies,  though  it 
was  still  too  nigh  the  Southern  blight  to 
reap  to  the  full  the  fruits  of  early  ad 
vantage.  Poe,  by  virtue  of  his  journal 
istic  interest,  reached  farther  with  the 
circle  of  his  correspondence  than  any  of 
his  contemporaries,  and  he  touched  St. 
Louis,  on  the  extreme  hem  of  possible 
literary  enterprise. 

Throughout  all  this  area  school,  sem 
inary,  academy,  college,  and  what  has 
since  grown  into  the  University,  were 
154 


THE  WEST 

part  and  parcel  of  the  life  of  the 
State,  the  denominations  and  the  am 
bitious  and  enterprising  youth;  and 
light  belles-lettres,  such  as  Prentiss  cul 
tivated  and  Thomas  collected,  fluttered 
pale  and  premature  in  the  complaisant 
press;  but  there  was  no  true  original 
growth.  The  literature  of  tradition, 
used  for  traditionary  purposes  in  tradi 
tionary  ways,  was  still  the  only  literature 
with  mastering  power;  what  was  newly 
produced  was  either  compounded  of  the 
old  or  weakly  imitated  it.  As  the  settle 
ment  moved  farther  West,  towards  and 
beyond  the  great  barriers,  the  intellect 
ual  life  took  on  more  and  more  the  char 
acter  of  missionary  enterprise,  such  as 
Starr  King  stood  for  in  California.  In 
those  vast  stretches,  under  a  sky  that  of 
itself  would  have  generated  again  the 
heavenly  Zeus  in  a  pre-Christian  race, 
155 


AMERICA   IN   LITERATURE 

amid  a  land  where  elemental  grandeurs 
are  closer  to  mankind  than  they  have 
been  since  the  primitive  world,  the  imag 
ination  remained  unstirred  to  expression, 
and  the  book  carried  into  the  waste  was 
the  Mormon  Bible.  It  is  not  strange. 
It  is  only  one  more  manifestation  of  the 
fact  that  a  race  which  has  begun  to 
write  is  already  old;  literature  flowers 
only  from  a  stock  long  planted  in  the 
earth;  it  may  be  carried  to  a  new  soil, 
but  it  bears  the  true  blossom  of  that  soil 
only  after  centuries  of  absorption.  Lit 
erature  as  an  instrument  of  the  practical 
life  the  West  always  had  in  full  measure, 
as  the  coast  colonies  had  possessed  it 
and  employed  it ;  imagination,  in  its  prac 
tical  function  to  plan  a  nation,  and  in  its 
sympathetic  activities  to  bind  society 
together,  and  with  the  past  and  future, 
it  also  had  and  used;  but  the  ideal 

156 


THE    WEST 

imagination,  the  power  to  recast  truth 
and  remake  the  world,  had  not  arrived 
in  the  West,  nor,  indeed,  has  it  ever  ar 
rived  there.  The  whole  great  country, 
with  all  its  civilization,  its  prosperity, 
its  education — all  its  immeasurable  suc 
cess  in  the  practical  sphere  of  what  is 
necessary  and  wholesome  for  the  entire 
life  of  man  in  body  and  mind — has  not 
produced  so  much  in  literature  for  the 
world  as  have  the  Russian  steppes;  and, 
like  Turgenieff,  Bret  Harte  lived  abroad, 
and  Joaquin  Miller,  like  Tolstoi,  was  a 
hermit-dreamer  at  home. 

The  earliest  stir  of  original  literary 
impulse  in  the  West  was  by  way  of  hu 
mor.  The  population  was  a  gathering 
of  strongly  marked  race  -  types  from 
many  lands,  a  museum  and  nursery  of 
incongruities;  the  new  environment  was 
an  added  element  of  contrast  in  a  so- 
157 


AMERICA    IN    LITERATURE 

ciety  quickly  adapting  itself  to  changed 
and  strange  conditions;  freedom  of  life 
gave  the  rein  to  forceful  eccentricity 
and  to  weakness  of  foible  and  foolish 
ness.  Many  a  man  found  his  true  char 
acter  in  a  day,  who,  under  the  pressure 
of  social  convention,  insincere  profes 
sion,  and  the  general  tyranny  of  what 
was  expected  of  him,  might  in  his  birth 
place  never  have  suspected  his  own  ex 
istence;  and  no  effective  secrecy  was 
possible  in  the  all-revealing  air  of  that 
character-testing  struggle.  Under  such 
circumstances  humor  emerged  as  a  saving 
grace.  Laughter  was  bred  into  the  peo 
ple  ;  it  solved  many  situations,  it  lessened 
the  friction  of  close  personal  contact,  it 
made  for  peace,  being  the  alternative 
for  ill-nature  or  a  blow.  The  constancy 
of  it  shows  its  spontaneity.  In  the 
camps  of  the  miner,  on  the  river  steam- 


THE   WEST 

boats,  in  the  taverns  of  the  court  circuit, 
there  sprang  up  inexhaustible  anecdotes, 
rallies  of  wit,  yarns,  and  fanciful  lies  and 
jokes  on  the  dullard  or  the  stranger.     If 
it  be  true  that  our  unliterary  humorists 
were  rather  a  newspaper  product  of  the 
East,  and  that  they  took  origin  from 
some  of  these  same  elements,  it  was, 
nevertheless,  in  the  West  that  American 
humor  most  nourished,  for  there  the  con 
ditions  were  found  united.     It  was  as  if 
all  the  world  had  gone  on  a  picaresque 
journey  by  general  consent  in  various 
quarters,  and  at  the  chance  round-up 
for  nightly  rest  and  refreshment  fell  to 
telling  what,  and  especially  whom,  they 
had  met  with.     Out  of  this  atmosphere' 
came    Lincoln,   our    greatest    practical 
humorist,  with  that  marvellous  power, 
turning  all  he  touched  to  wisdom ;  and  on 
the  free,  imaginative  side,  Mark  Twain,' 
159 


AMERICA    IN    LITERATURE 

1  our  capital  example,  was  blood  and  bone 
of  this  Western  humor.  He  is  its  cli 
max,  although,  fun  for  fun's  sake 
being  his  rule,  he  often  goes  sprawl 
ing,  for  fun  seldom  stands  alone;  for 
long  life  it  has  to  mate  with  some 
thing,  to  blend  with  other  elements,  as  in 
the  great  humorists.  Truth  must  touch 
it,  as  in  Lincoln's  case,  or  character,  as 
in  Shakespeare's,  before  it  goes  home  to 
the  mark.  In  its  living  forms  in  the 
West,  character  was  always  near  to  it, 
and  a  Franklin-like  lesson  was  often  its 
honey.  Extravaganza  is  a  kind  of  prac 
tical  joke  on  the  mind,  and  with  other 
practical  jokes  falls  to  a  secondary  place. 
Humor  that  mixes  with  the  truth  of  life 
is  the  better  bread.  In  the  West  there 
was  one  omnipresent  element  with  which 
it  had  natural  affinity — the  quality  of 
picturesqueness.  This  existed  in  all 
1 60 


THE    WEST 

forms,  in  character,  incident,  and  set 
ting.  It  was  a  foregone  conclusion  that 
when  the  artist  came  he  would  combine 
these  —  humor  and  picturesqueness  — 
with  each  other,  and  both  with  ro 
mance. 

The  artist  came  in  Bret  Harte.  He 
was  not,  like  Mark  Twain,  born  of  the 
stuff  in  which  he  worked.  His  art  is 
not  that  of  the  native  life  becoming  con 
scious  of  itself  and  finding  original  ex 
pression.  He  was  a  visitor  from  the 
outer  world,  Eastern -born  and  Eastern- 
bred.  The  son  of  a  Greek  professor  who 
taught  in  a  college  at  Albany,  in  New 
York,  he  grew  up  in  a  library,  bred  on 
literature  from  boyhood,  when  alone 
such  breeding  takes,  with  his  brain 
stuffed  carelessly  with  the  best  English 
humor  and  romance,  and,  indeed,  if 
Don  Quixote,  Gil  Bias,  The  Arabian 
"  161 


AMERICA    IN    LITERATURE 

Nights,  and  Tales  of  the  Genii  be  added, 
the  best  in  the  world.  Still  a  stripling 
youth,  he  was  flung  into  the  Calif ornian 
ferment,  impressionable  and  sharp  to 
observe,  with  eyes  trained  on  contem 
poraneous  man  under  the  tutelage  of  the 
art  of  Dickens,  with  its  large  resources 
of  comedy,  sentiment,  and  kindliness. 
He  had  shown  the  literary  gift  from 
childhood;  he  could  meditate  his  ex 
perience,  brood  over  his  creatures  and 
love  them,  and  his  skill  in  language  was 
fine  to  serve  his  ends.  The  relaxed 
moral  strain  of  convention  about  him 
loosed  his  tongue  and  let  him  have  his 
say  of  the  thoughts  and  feelings  within 
him.  The  environment  was  crowded 
with  artistic  elements,  and  he  began  to 
select,  with  directness  and  simplicity, 
and  combine  and  create;  and,  without 
knowing  it,  he  had  found  the  gold  that 
162 


THE    WEST 

grows  not  dim  and  melts  not  away.  His 
graphic  power  was  great;  the  vividness 
of  the  scenes,  the  sharpness  of  the  char 
acter,  the  telling  force  of  the  incident, 
the  reality  of  the  talk,  the  simple  depth 
of  the  sentiment,  made  up  a  body  of 
human  truth,  clear,  picturesque,  sincere, 
and  homespun,  which  went  at  once  to 
the  heart. 

It  is  maintained,  perhaps  gener 
ally,  that  Bret  Harte's  tales  are  pure 
inventions,  and  that  what  he  de 
scribes  had  no  actual  existence  in  the 
mining  country.  He  himself  asserted 
the  contrary,  saying  that  he  found  in 
reality  the  starting-point  of  both  char 
acter  and  incident;  and  I  believe  him. 
The  limitations  of  his  genius  lead  me  to 
do  so.  He  lacked  power  of  the  sort  that 
constructs  and  feeds  from  fecund  ob 
servation  and  sympathy  a  great  novel; 


AMERICA    IN    LITERATURE 

though  he  accomplished  all  that  his  spe 
cific  material  was  capable  of,  in  verse, 
his  poetry  is  tame  when  he  leaves  his 
peculiar  ground;  his  distinction  lies  in 
his  short  tales,  and  he  continued  through 
life  to  work  the  same  narrow  vein;  this 
argues  adherence  to  a  known  subject, 
dependence  on  experience  and  memory, 
the  presence  of  a  basis  of  actuality.  A 
free  imagination,  in  the  sense  of  irre 
sponsible  invention,  would  have  been 
less  trammelled. 

Indeed,  it  is  Bret  Harte's  artistic 
truth  that  constitutes  the  novelty  and 
charm  of  his  work,  and  makes  its  way 
in  the  wide  world,  far  from  the  canons 
where  it  was  cradled.  It  has  demo 
cratic  power.  The  vital  persistence  of 
human  nature  in  men  and  women,  the 
primitive  emotions  and  virtues  of  our 
kind  still  instinctively  put  forth,  to  com- 
164 


THE    WEST 

fort  and  support  life  in  comradery,  in 
dependent  of  civilization  left  behind, 
and  institutions  dropped  out,  and  the 
habits  of  orderly  society  disused  —  the 
man  in  his  natural  manhood,  the  woman 
in  her  natural  womanhood — this  is  the 
core  of  the  life  he  sets  forth ;  and  the  hu 
man  qualities  in  his  tales  have  their 
brilliancy  of  tone  and  effect,  because 
they  are  so  disengaged  from  convention, 
institution,  use  and  wont,  and  show  the 
clear  grain.  Character  is  the  mark  he 
aims  at,  and  unless  character  has  truth, 
it  is  naught.  He  had  seen  men  in  un 
dress;  and  though  he  noticed  the  cos 
tume  and  the  drawl,  the  shabby  or  mis 
erable  detail,  still,  for  his  eyes,  the  man 
remained,  and  was  the  absorbing  object 
of  his  interpreting  art.  This  is,  in  litera 
ture,  to  have  democratic  power. 

With  it  goes  the  philanthropic  instinct, 

165 


AMERICA    IN    LITERATURE 

the  wish  to  bring  out  the  man  hidden 
there,  obscure  in  the  caking  of  circum 
stance,  of  the  working-day  world,  of  slov 
enliness,  of  vice  and  crime,  and  to  make 
him  appear  in  his  original  human  nature, 
above  the  drudge,  the  loafer,  the  crim 
inal  that  he  is  to  the  casual  eye  and 
the  hard  mind.  Toleration,  which  goes 
hand-in-hand  with  personal  liberty,  and 
is  its  unfailing  companion,  is  a  necessary 
ingredient  in  this  human  art — the  art,  it 
need  hardly  be  said,  of  Dickens,  for 
Bret  Harte  derives  from  Dickens  as 
plainly  as  Irving  from  Goldsmith,  and 
Cooper  from  Scott,  and  he  gracefully 
acknowledged  his  indebtedness.  It  is 
those  who  condemn  the  art  of  Dickens 
as  tawdry,  sentimental,  deformed  by 
caricature,  that  see  no  reality  in  Bret 
Harte.  The  same  persons  sneer  at  the 
whole  range  of  humane  effort  from  black 
166 


THE    WEST 

suffrage  to  criminal  reform  as  sentimen 
tality,  and  have  yet  to  learn  the  lesson 
of  democracy — so  hard  is  it  for  the  arti 
ficial  man,  who,  even  in  a  republic,  is  the 
man  of  a  caste,  to  believe  that  God  has 
sown  human  nature  as  wide  as  the  dai 
sies,  as  numerous  as  the  waves,  and 
made  earth  noble  with  its  multitude  as 
the  heaven  with  stars. 

Bret  Harte  represents  indestructible 
courage  and  love  as  natural  elements 
in  man's  bosom,  shown  in  action  and 
self  -  forgetful  virtue,  and  always  re 
spected  by  the  on  -  lookers,  however 
vulgar,  unkempt,  debauched;  and  he 
blends  this  eternal  moral  with  comedy, 
and  even  grotesqueness,  without  tar 
nishing  it.  The  West  gave  him  all 
the  human  garniture  of  the  scene  in 
character,  incident,  and  the  action's 
glow;  and  it  must  be  believed,  too,  that 
167 


AMERICA    IN    LITERATURE 

as  in  local  color  he  was  faithful  to  his 
material,  he  was  also  a  true  representa 
tive  of  the  Western  spirit  in  this  demo 
cratic,  philanthropic,  tolerant  art,  by 
means  of  which  his  youthful  tempera 
ment,  highly  cultivated  by  letters  as  it 
had  been;  found  imaginative  embodi 
ment.  This  humorous  romancer,  gen 
tle,  tender,  hospitable,  and  just,  so 
finely  sensitive  to  the  unspoken  pathos 
of  the  hard,  starved,  brutal  lot  of  the 
miner's  life,  was,  in  spirit  as  well  as  in 
the  literal  facts,  an  exponent  of  the  new 
world's  story  —  an  American  in  every 
fibre.  Otherwise  his  reputation  would 
hardly  have  exceeded  the  limits  of  his 
editorial-room,  and  spread  not  only 
through  the  East,  but  abroad.  England 
would  not  have  continued  to  read  his 
writings  after  his  own  land  had  tired  of 
them.  He  made  a  universal  appeal, 
1 68 


THE    WEST 

though  working  always  through  a  local 
type  of  no  great  range  of  character  or 
adventure;  he  did  this  by  fidelity  to 
primitive  human  feelings  in  natures  so 
deep  and  simple  that  their  profound 
truth  almost  escapes  observation  in  the 
powerful  impression  they  make,  and,  of 
course,  much  is  masked  by  his  artistic 
method.  He  is  more  than  the  sketcher 
of  a  passing  phase  of  pioneer  days  in  the 
gold  mountains;  that  would  be  little 
enough;  he  created  lasting  pictures  of 
human  life,  some  of  which  have  the 
eternal  outline  and  pose  of  a  Theocritean 
idyl.  The  supreme  nature  of  his  gift  is 
shown  by  the  fact  that  he  had  no  rival 
and  left  no  successor.  His  work  is  as 
unique  as  that  of  Poe  or  Hawthorne. 

One  other  author  bears  the  character 
istics  of  the  West  on  his  imagination. 
Joaquin  Miller  had  the  endowment  of  a 
169 


AMERICA    IN    LITERATURE 

poet,  and  has  taken  up  into  his  verse  the 
physical  atmosphere  of  the  great  soli 
tudes,  and  the  free  career  of  life  led 
amid  them.  The  ranges,  the  deserts, 
the  sweep  of  the  plains,  the  flood  of 
burning  light,  the  glory  of  color,  are  all 
caught  in  his  framing  lines ;  the  startling 
phenomena  of  torrent  and  blazing  prai 
rie,  and  the  sudden  catastrophes  of  the 
cattle-lands  are  there;  the  scene,  illimit 
able  and  lonely,  where  life  is  but  a  speck, 
is  mirrored  both  physically  and  in  feel 
ing  ;  but  often  his  muse  itself  seems  lost 
in  the  vastness.  His  gift  is  lyrical,  not 
dramatic,  and  nature  is  more  than  man 
in  it;  yet  the  human  life  he  renders  is 
also  appropriate.  It  is  a  life  that  is  only 
the  passion  of  living,  a  loose  of  energy, 
unbridled,  fearless,  maddened  by  its 
own  liberty;  its  body  is  sensation,  or 
such  action  as  is  only  sensation  in  an- 
170 


THE   WEST 

other  form — an  intoxication  with  the 
stream  of  life  flowing  through  the  man; 
it  is  clear  emotion,  and  laughs  at  all  con 
vention  and  restraint — the  freedom  of 
the  outlaw,  the  filibuster,  the  despera 
do.  So  far  as  there  is  any  specific  local 
color,  the  Spanish  -  Mexican  predomi 
nates  in  both  landscape  and  character; 
and  the  latter,  except  in  the  point  of 
passion,  is  rather  an  affair  of  the  ac 
coutrements —  the  horse  is  more  than 
the  man.  He  is  a  riding  poet,  of  course; 
the  lope  of  the  prairie  is  in  his  fine  lines, 
and  is  the  best  part  of  them.  There  is 
a  clear,  poetic  power  here,  atmospheric, 
pictorial,  deep  -  breathed ;  one  wonders 
at  the  seeming  barrenness,  not  to  say 
paucity,  of  the  result.  The  whole  is  a 
monotone;  there  is  the  same  lover,  the 
same  maiden — the  same  wild  grandeur 
of  nature,  the  same  sense  of  the  infinite 
171 


AMERICA    IN    LITERATURE 

in  both,  the  universe  without  and  the 
passion  of  living  beating  within,  and  this 
harmony  of  combination  once  estab 
lished  is  never  varied  from,  though  some 
times  it  is  given  by  fragments  instead  of 
in  its  completeness. 

The  part  of  Byron  in  it  is  manifest, 
for  Joaquin  Miller  goes  back  to  Byron, 
as  Bret  Harte  does  to  Dickens;  and  if 
it  is  curious  to  observe  Byronism,  the 
offspring  of  continental  despairs,  stamp 
an  image  of  itself,  in  however  lower 
a  degree,  in  the  untamed  life  of  the 
West,  this  is  evidence  how  constant 
and  instinctive  in  the  world  of  society, 
under  its  present  conditions,  is  that 
mood  for  which  Byronism  gave  the 
imaginative  and  sentimental  formulas 
in  all  lands  of  modern  civilization.  The 
delight  in  elemental  grandeur,  the  love 
of  freedom,  which  were  the  noblest 
172 


THE    WEST 

traits  of  Byron,  exist  here  in  less  power, 
or  in  their  less  excellent  forms;  on  the 
human  side  man  is,  in  this  verse,  of  the 
pirate  type,  and  woman  has  Turkish 
mobility,  while  the  melodramatic  pose 
of  both  action  and  passion,  and  the  note 
of  egotistic  melancholy,  are  leading  feat 
ures;  such  is  the  literary  tradition  fol 
lowed,  and  it  is  secondary  in  the  work. 
What  is  primary  is  easily  perceived — 
the  sense  of  the  mighty  landscape,  the 
enthusiasm  for  its  great  phases,  the  de 
light  in  the  adventurous  occupations  of 
the  men,  the  lust  of  life  in  the  wild  open ; 
the  poet  handles  these  things  best  be 
cause  he  loves  them.  The  secondary, 
Byronic  elements,  enter  the  verse  only 
to  impair  it ;  and  this  happens  especially 
in  the  realm  of  character  which  turns 
theatrical.  In  The  Arizonian — the  most 
striking  portrait  —  vivid  and  suggestive 
173 


AMERICA    IN    LITERATURE 

as  much  of  it  is,  by  means  of  color,  mu 
sic,  and  feeling,  the  poet  misses  the  type, 
and  brings  it  out  flattened  and  defaced. 
With  Walker  in  Nicaragua,  the  best 
poem,  though  in  Byron's  manner,  has 
also  a  quality  of  its  own,  a  verve  and 
motion  which  make  it  sure  of  just  ap 
preciation;  and  one  cannot  help  think 
ing  that  had  it  been  found  in  some  old 
French  manuscript,  as  a  chanson  of  some 
Norman  filibuster  in  the  pirate  African 
seas,  it  would  be  the  delight  of  poets 
and  the  treasure-trove  of  scholars.  But 
there  was  some  lack  of  power  in  Joaquin 
Miller  which  denied  to  him  the  summa 
tion  of  his  qualities  in  the  concentrated 
creative  faculty.  His  monotone,  with 
all  its  sonority,  dulls  the  ear,  as  his  color 
wearies  the  eye;  the  senses,  overtired, 
cease  to  act,  and  the  mind  has  not  been 
awakened.  One  misses  the  strong,  in- 
174 


THE    WEST 

tellectual  force  that  lay  back  of  all  By 
ron's  work,  and  the  landscapes  of  Ari 
zona  are  no  substitute  for  it. 

What  of  reality  there  was  in  Joaquin 
Miller's  work  it  would  be  a  subtle  matter 
to  define,  for  actual  things  suffer  strange 
transformations  in  a  true  poet's  mind, 
without  losing  their  original  nature.  He 
loved  the  Western  country  with  native 
passion;  once,  it  is  true,  a  will-o'-the- 
wisp  of  fame  drew  him  across  the  Atlan 
tic  to  wander  about  the  Mediterranean 
and  to  pose  in  London  drawing-rooms, 
but  his  heart  never  strayed  from  its 
own  natural  horizon.  He  is  opposed  to 
Bret  Harte  in  one  capital  point :  the  lat 
ter  drew  the  characters  he  knew  just  as 
he  knew  them,  still  in  the  toils  of  work, 
chance,  and  circumstance,  in  the  bonds 
of  men  living  together  for  good  or  ill,  in 
the  necessary  ways  of  social  beings ;  but 


AMERICA    IN    LITERATURE 

Joaquin  Miller  endeavored  to  interpret 
that  ideal  of  the  free  life,  beyond  the 
toils  and  out  of  the  bonds,  which  is  one 
conception  of  Western  opportunity  and 
practice — the  life  without  a  rein.  The 
instinct  from  which  the  dream  springs  is 
fundamental  in  mankind;  it  has  sent 
hermits  to  the  desert,  yeomen  to  the 
greenwood,  and  gallants  to  the  Spanish 
Main  time  out  of  mind ;  and  on  the  great 
plains  and  in  the  canyons  it  has  had  its 
adventurers.  In  literature  it  belongs 
especially  with  that  beatification  of 
Nature  which  took  place  in  the  Revo 
lutionary  times;  and  the  eagle  and  the 
lion  and  the  "noble  savage"  were  sup 
posed  to  exemplify  its  blessedness.  It 
is  a  false  dream,  because  restraint  is  the 
law  of  both  man's  power  and  his  happi 
ness;  but  it  has  always  had  its  followers, 
a  crew  of  men  longing  for  it  and  striving 
176 


THE   WEST 

after  it  in  the  reckless  vigor  of  young 
manhood;  and  such  men,  such  a  spirit, 
there  were  in  the  Western  conquest. 
Joaquin  Miller  catches  some  of  the  traits, 
the  impulses,  the  joys  of  it;  but  in  ren 
dering  it  by  means  of  the  Byron  con 
vention,  peopling  the  lone  landscape 
with  the  operatic  ghosts  of  Conrad  and 
Haidee,  he  gives  such  an  impression  of 
falsity  that  what  truth  there  may  be 
escapes.  It  is  only  where  the  touch  of 
personal  experience  is  plain,  where  the 
individualization  exceeds  the  power  of 
imitative  fancy  to  conjure,  where  the 
horse  is  felt  under  the  rider,  and  a  man's 
hand  in  the  grasp  of  a  man,  as  in  the 
Nicaragua  tale,  that  this  life  and  this 
spirit  realizes  itself  as  something  that 
might  have  been.  Wherever  the  truth 
may  lie,  as  to  the  reality  of  the  inspira 
tion  and  the  interpretation,  it  will  re- 
177 


AMERICA    IN    LITERATURE 

main  Joaquin  Miller's  peculiar  trait  that 
he  alone  has  attempted  to  transfer  to 
imagination  this  emotional  phase  of  the 
West,  which  lies  so  nigh  to  all  romanc 
ing  thoughts  of  the  free  life  there;  if 
it  turns  to  melodrama  in  his  hands,  it 
should  be  remembered  that  it  has  done 
the  same  in  the  hands  of  all  poets,  at  all 
times.  Those  who  are  restless  under 
society,  and  are  fond  to  imagine  wild 
freedom,  and  to  think  of  its  place  as 
in  the  uncivilized  tracts  of  earth,  will 
continue  to  find  in  his  verse  one  pas 
sionate  record  of  what  they  seek. 

A  third  author,  Lew  Wallace,  felt  the 
influence  of  the  romantic  West,  acting 
on  his  historical  imagination.  The  Fair 
God,  a  story  of  the  Aztecs,  holds  no  great 
place  in  our  literature ;  but  it  was  in  this 
tale  that  the  author  first  exercised  his 
invention,  and  that  it  was  due  to  his 


THE    WEST 

Southwestern  experience  is  certain.  Ori 
ental  traits  are  recognizable  in  Joaquin 
Miller;  there  are  touches  of  Arabia  in 
his  lines;  and  the  coloring  and  atmos 
phere  of  Arizona  and  New  Mexico,  the 
blend  of  Spanish  antiquity  in  the  land 
scape,  were  in  some  sort  a  preparation  in 
Lew  Wallace  for  his  treatment  of  the 
Scriptural  times  and  scenes  in  the  work 
by  which  he  is  known,  Ben  Hur.  This 
story,  too,  hardly  rises  into  the  domain 
of  literature,  but  the  pietistic  romance 
has  always  been  popular  in  our  com 
munities,  and  should  be  reckoned  with 
in  an  account  of  our  literary  life.  At  an 
earlier  date  domesticity  afforded  the 
substance  and  sphere  of  this  novel  as  in 
The  Wide,  Wide  World;  but,  in  Lew 
Wallace's  rendering,  history  took  its 
place,  and,  on  the  whole,  the  appropriate 
history.  He  derives,  it  is  true — for  all 
179 


AMERICA    IN    LITERATURE 

our  authors  have  a  sponsor — from  Victor 
Hugo  in  the  main  and  characteristically, 
though  he  lies,  of  course,  also  in  the 
general  stream  of  historical  fiction;  and 
it  would  be  futile  to  seek,  in  his  stirring 
tale  of  races  long  gone  by,  the  stamp  of 
Western  civilization,  except  so  far  as  it 
was  absorbed  by  the  West  in  common 
with  the  whole  country.  But  it  is  not 
fanciful  to  find  in  his  impressions  of  the 
Western  land  that  original  sympathy 
which,  in  his  genius,  was  to  find  so  for 
eign  and  distant  material.  Such  works 
as  he  wrote — and  they  have  been  de 
scribed  as  apart  from  all  American  life — 
are  brooded  over  in  long  solitude,  and 
proceed  from  very  deep  and  elemental 
impressions  of  a  vast  world.  It  is,  at 
least,  noticeable  that  the  third  writer  of 
the  West  was,  like  Bret  Harte  and  Joa- 
quin  Miller,  a  romancer  pure  and  simple. 
180 


THE    WEST 

The  mood,  the  point  of  view,  the  tem 
perament  belong  to  the  Western  envi 
ronment,  so  far  as  it  is  an  environment 
of  the  imagination,  and  a  great  gulf  di 
vides  these  three  writers  from  all  others 
who  have  been  characteristically  of  that 
part  of  the  country.  They  stamp  the 
enduring  literature  of  the  early  West  as 
romantic  to  the  core.  It  is  true  that 
the  settled  and  civilized  West — the  West 
of  the  railways  and  the  cities  and  the 
colleges — has  also  now  produced  books; 
its  glades  and  birds  have  had  their  poets, 
its  country  towns  and  travelled  roads 
their  novelists,  sweet  in  melody,  admira 
ble  in  realistic  rendering,  the  sincere  and 
honest  work  of  our  own  generation ;  but 
they  fall  outside  the  limits  of  this  survey, 
and  may  be  left  to  later  critics  of  a  new 
time.  Within  the  limits  here  maintained, 
the  nascent  literature  of  the  West  lay 
181 


AMERICA    IN    LITERATURE 

wholly  in  the  fortunes  of  these  three  ro 
mancers,  each  in  his  sphere  of  the  tale, 
the  poem,  and  the  novel — Bret  Harte, 
Joaquin  Miller,  and  Lew  Wallace. 


THE  ACHIEVEMENT 

IF  it  were  true,  according  to  the  old 
saying,  which  is  by  some  reputed 
wise,  that  the  nation  is  happiest  which 
has  no  history,  the  same  maxim  might 
hold  good  of  a  people  without  a  litera 
ture  ;  for  literature  in  its  great  forms  is  in 
some  sort  connected  with  times  of  na 
tional  stress  and  upheaval,  and  genius, 
which  is  its  medium,  is  made  active  by  a 
similar  unrest  and  excitement  in  itself. 
The  secondary  character  of  American 
literature  in  its  first  century,  its  inferi 
ority  in  mass  and  quality  to  the  con 
temporary  productions  of  England  and 

183 


AMERICA    IN    LITERATURE 

France,  is  everywhere  acknowledged; 
and  the  youthfulness  of  our  national 
life,  our  absorption  in  material  and  pro 
fessional  pursuits,  in  subduing  nature 
and  applying  self-government  and  de 
veloping  economic  and  social  relations, 
and  generally  in  finding  ourselves,  which 
is  the  business  of  youth,  besides  many 
other  similar  considerations,  are  alleged 
as  concurrent  causes  of  this  delayed 
and  incomplete  success  in  literary  crea 
tion.  In  any  exposition  of  our  national 
achievements  of  the  last  century  the  fine 
arts,  and  among  them  literature,  would 
occupy  a  small  corner  in  comparative 
importance  when  set  in  competition 
with  the  general  results  of  our  total  hu 
man  labor.  Perhaps  one  reason  for  this, 
as  good  as  any  of  those  just  summarized, 
is  the  prosperity,  the  usually  regular 
and  free  movement  of  development,  in 
184 


THE    ACHIEVEMENT 

a  word,  the  happiness  of  the  people — the 
general  peace,  the  absence  of  revolt,  of 
sudden  and  profound  change  in  ideal 
ends,  of  revolutionary  aspiration,  of  all 
that  makes  for  desperate  battle  and 
deep  desire  in  the  spirit  of  man.  Great 
as  our  political  and  social  growth  has 
been,  powerful  and  broad  as  the  forces 
of  humanity  and  freedom  have  shown 
themselves,  and  deepening  down  with 
wider  inclusions  among  the  whole  body 
politic,  the  marvellous  thing  has  been 
the  gentleness  of  the  process  on  the 
whole;  only  one  principle  was  "rained 
in  blood,"  and  the  dawn,  save  for  that, 
was  without  the  traditional  "thunder 
peal"  of  a  new  age.  And  what  is  true 
of  national  life  is  true  also  of  individual 
genius;  our  men  of  letters,  taken  to 
gether,  have  been  men  of  quietness. 
The  great  European  movement  of  the 


AMERICA    IN    LITERATURE 

last  century  in  literature,  on  the  other 
hand,  was  that  romanticism  which  was 
the  blossoming  bower  where  the  blood  of 
the  Revolution  was  turned  to  forms  of 
beauty  and  passion  and  marvel ;  its  lead 
ers  were  restlessly  alive,  and  remote  as 
their  work  in  imagination  and  intellect 
and  sentiment  might  be  from  anything 
obtusely  political  or  social,  verse  and 
prose  alike  were  fed  from  careers  of 
moral,  intellectual,  emotional  strife, 
from  a  movement  in  the  minds  of  men 
seeking  new  gods  and  revealing  new 
gospels  in  every  part  of  man's  and  nat 
ure's  life.  It  is  a  vain  task  to  look  for 
anything  corresponding  to  this  in  the 
literature  of  our  era  of  good  feeling,  al 
though,  as  we  were  an  intellectually 
dependent  and  colonial -minded  people 
and  importers  of  literary  fashions,  some 
traces  of  the  romantic  revolution  may  be 
186 


THE    ACHIEVEMENT 

found  in  our  earlier  books ;  but  these  are 
truly  "naught,"  if  the  scale  of  the  cen 
tury  be  applied  to  them.  The  early 
American  romance,  with  which  our  im 
aginative  prose  began,  however  interest 
ing  to  ourselves  historically  and  to  a  lit 
erary  student  as  an  illustration  of  taste, 
was  an  offshoot  of  the  operatic  and 
sentimental  tale,  the  wonder  novel  and 
its  congeners  in  the  radical  school,  and 
was  secondary  to  the  works  of  Mrs. 
Radcliffe,  Godwin,  and  Lewis.  Charles 
Brockden  Brown's  novels,  which  have 
resisted  resurrection  more  pertinaciously 
than  any  other  victim  of  the  publish 
ers'  mania  for  the  uncopy righted,  mark 
ed  a  moment,  but  marked  it  with  a 
grave  instead  of  an  immortality;  and 
Allston,  with  his  thin  Monaldi,  and  the 
elder  Dana,  with  his  Byron  -  Bulwer 
stripe,  exhaust  the  list  of  remembered 
187 


AMERICA    IN    LITERATURE 

names  in  fiction  till  Sir  Walter  Scott's 
great  tradition  of  the  romantic  treat 
ment  of  history  and  humble  life  was 
taken  over  by  Cooper,  who  was  its  ear 
liest  and  last  American  master.  Mean 
while  the  classical  manner  of  Addison, 
both  in  humor  and  all  else,  had  survived 
the  extinction  of  the  manor-line  at  home 
by  transplantation  here  in  Irving  and 
his  successors,  whose  pleasantness  in 
letters  has  continued  to  the  days  of  Cur 
tis  and  Warner.  These  three  strands  of 
the  early  pseudo-romance,  the  historical 
romance,  and  the  Addisonian  light  es 
say,  constitute  our  characteristic  borrow 
ings  from  the  mother-country,  and  they 
are  all  in  prose.  In  poetry  there  was  no 
such  appropriation;  Shelley  and  Keats, 
Tennyson  and  Browning,  Swinburne 
and  Rossetti,  have  found  no  continuance 
here  in  any  native  work  of  enduring 
188 


THE    ACHIEVEMENT 

worth,  and  the  same  is  true  of  later 
prose  authors  of  England.  On  the  small 
scale,  and  among  our  minor  writers, 
there  has  been  imitativeness  in  tone  and 
theme;  there  have  been  little  Dickenses 
and  even  little  Mrs.  Hemanses,  the  Mat- 
thewses  and  Sigourneys  of  our  middle 
period ;  but  in  the  main  and  on  the  part 
of  our  national  writers  the  English  tra 
dition  has  been  incorporated  in  our  lit 
erature  by  a  broad  academic  culture 
from  the  past  rather  than  by  immediate 
and  conscious  imitation  and  transference 
in  the  present  day. 

Our  colonial  dependence  in  literature, 
in  fact,  has  not  been  so  pre-eminently 
English  as  is  commonly  thought.  It 
has  been  far  more  a  European  matter 
than  is  appreciated.  Longfellow,  our 
first  poet  of  culture,  is  the  representative 
case;  and  his  service  in  making  Conti- 
189 


AMERICA   IN   LITERATURE 

nental  poetry  known  in  this  country  is 
too  much  neglected.  To  others,  as  to 
him,  the  past,  whose  charm  won  on  the 
imagination  and  affections,  was  one  of 
the  castled  Rhine,  of  lovely  Italy,  of  ro 
mantic  Spain,  of  French  cathedral 
towns,  and  the  picturesqueness  of  Hol 
land,  quite  as  much  as  of  the  mother- 
country.  The  German  influence  was 
dominant  in  transcendentalism  at  Bos 
ton,  and  the  long  line  of  Dante  scholars, 
from  George  Ticknor  to  Charles  Norton 
at  Harvard,  is  significant  of  a  live  tradi 
tion  in  poetic  outlook  and  taste ;  and  the 
mention  of  Ticknor,  with  his  history  of 
Spanish  literature,  recalls  the  curious 
closeness  of  Spain  to  our  own  literary 
land,  in  the  histories  of  Prescott  and 
Motley,  and  from  Irving  to  Lowell. 
Howells,  too,  has  in  his  earlier  days  bor 
rowed  from  Italy  for  description  and 
190 


THE    ACHIEVEMENT 

literary  history,  and  in  his  later  career 
has  done,  in  some  measure,  for  Conti 
nental  contemporary  fiction  what  Long 
fellow  did  for  the  treasures  of  verse,  and 
in  our  own  fiction  the  tribute  of  The 
Marble  Faun  to  Italy  is  a  supreme  in 
stance  of  international  gratitude.  It  is 
to  be  observed  that  this  connection  with 
the  Continent,  so  natural,  so  continuous, 
so  radiant  with  what  it  gave  to  us,  was 
one  through  culture,  either  literary  or 
artistic,  and  not  one  through  action;  it 
was  the  past  of  these  lands,  not  their 
present  —  the  antiquity,  learning,  and 
sentiment  of  their  past,  not  the  roman 
ticism  of  their  still  vital  present — that 
attracted  the  American  interest,  except 
in  the  late  and  single  case  of  Howells  in 
fiction;  and  of  this  culture  and  its  ef 
fects  in  art  and  taste,  Longfellow,  as  has 
been  said,  was  the  clear  star.  Try  as  he 
191 


AMERICA    IN    LITERATURE 

might  to  be  American  in  theme,  in 
Hiawatha,  Evangeline,  Miles  Stan- 
dish,  and  the  New  England  Tragedies, 
and  in  many  shorter  pieces,  his  art 
owed  its  simplicity,  its  mellowness,  its 
adequacy,  its  golden  success,  to  this  cult 
ure  working  out  in  the  new  soil  of  an 
American  nature,  its  refined  charm  in 
expression.  This  same  power  of  cult 
ure,  less  perfect  because  more  exclusive 
ly  English,  gave  dignity  to  Lowell's 
verse,  and  matter  also  to  his  prose.  It 
was  brain-culture,  through  contact  with 
the  old  books  of  the  world,  and  with 
what  then  passed  for  neoplatonic  and 
Oriental  thought,  which  gave  atmos 
phere  to  Emerson's  universe.  Wherever 
the  subject  be  taken  up,  it  will  be  found 
that  what  is  called  our  colonialism  is 
very  much  misapprehended  if  it  be 
thought  of  as  an  English  tie  only;  we 
192 


THE    ACHIEVEMENT 

have  not  been  in  this  century  intellect 
ually  an  English  colony,  but  we  have 
been  deeply  indebted  for  impulse  and 
guidance,  for  outlook  and  method,  for  a 
thousand  subtly  shaping  influences,  to 
all  the  world  beyond  seas,  where  both 
thought  and  life  are  old.  It  is  singular 
that  our  recognizable  dependence  on 
France  seems  so  slight;  it  is,  perhaps, 
only  to  be  seen  in  Henry  James. 

It  would  appear,  then,  that  our  litera 
ture  has  been  sundered  from  the  great 
movement  of  romanticism  abroad  and 
its  incarnations  of  democracy,  philan 
thropy,  and  science,  its  experiments  and 
pilgrimages;  and  that  our  contact  with 
the  Continent  has  been  with  its  past  in 
history,  sentiment,  poetic  form,  critical 
canon,  artistic  impression  and  the  like, 
from  which  our  men  of  letters  derived 
culture,  and  a  certain  dignity  and  grace 
13  193 


AMERICA    IN    LITERATURE 

of  literary  demeanor,  in  the  scholarly 
group  of  which  Irving,  Longfellow,  and 
Lowell  are  typical  names.  But  if  sun 
dered,  the  nation  has  had  a  life  of  its 
own,  less  turbulent  and  perplexed,  less 
liable  to  chaotic  and  eccentric  motions, 
less  on  the  grand  scale  of  internal  battle 
and  social  upheaval,  but  rather  a  life  of 
assured  self-command,  intelligent  and 
slow  change,  conservative  in  its  essence. 
If  one  forgets  Wordsworth,  he  will  be 
come  aware  more  surely  in  Bryant  of 
the  crystalline  horizons,  the  clear-seen 
mountain  lines,  and  the  bald  hill-sides  of 
our  rugged  but  ether-bathed  landscape; 
and  will  find  something  of  the  elemental 
in  nature  portrayed  in  his  poems  with  a 
severity  and  grand  simplicity  that  befit 
the  new  land  yet  uninhabited  save  by 
the  far-off  water-fowl;  it  is  an  original, 
powerful,  almost  Biblical  note,  fit  to  be 
194 


THE    ACHIEVEMENT 

the  first  verse  of  our  chapter.  Some 
thing  of  the  same  simplicity,  serenity, 
ascetic  power,  but  belonging  rather  to 
air  than  earth,  as  if  granite  were  spirit 
ualized  into  light,  there  is  in  Emerson, 
as  elemental  in  the  sphere  of  thought  as 
Bryant  in  that  of  nature ;  and  it  is  not  in 
the  bleakness  of  one  or  the  awkwardness 
of  the  other  that  the  American  quality 
is  found,  but  in  this  simplicity  which 
is  so  absolute  and  basal  as  almost  to 
evade  statement,  and  in  their  vision  and 
thought,  rendered  in 'literature,  is  what 
Grant  and  Lincoln  are,  rendered  in  char 
acter. 

Emerson  was  intellectually  cultured, 
as  was  said  above;  but  his  power  of 
expression  in  poetry  was  lacking  in  flu 
idity,  roundness,  and  ease;  his  poetry, 
artistically,  is  Byzantine  in  its  crudity, 
like  his  very  figure,  so  stiff,  so  serious,  so 


AMERICA    IN   LITERATURE 

formal  in  its  formlessness;  but  that  is 
the  accident  of  the  body;  the  insight, 
the  imagination,  the  flash  of  originality 
from  within  or  of  beauty  caught  from 
without,  make  the  inwardness  of  the 
verse,  and  judged  by  the  great  qualities 
of  the  spirit,  and  especially  by  that 
greatest  one  of  an  absolute  unconscious 
simplicity,  Emerson's  poetry  pierces 
heaven  at  the  highest  altitude  of  all  our 
bards.  His  prose  essays,  liberating  as 
they  are  to  the  mind  and  stimulating  to 
the  spiritual  life,  are  on  a  lower  level; 
his  patriotic  sayings,  his  great  American 
lines — and  no  poet  has  so  many,  bright 
as  the  lightnings  of  Zeus  —  are  in  his 
verse;  but  his  essays  are  the  flower  of 
transcendentalism,  which  stood  in  Amer 
ican  life  for  religious  revolt  sympathetic 
with  the  movement  of  enlightenment  on 
the  Continent,  and  they  are  the  result  of 
196 


THE   ACHIEVEMENT 

that  internal  conflict  consequent  on  a 
change  in  ideals  in  the  spiritual  sphere 
which  has  so  often  been  the  motive 
power  of  great  works  in  literature,  but 
was  here  attended  by  none  of  that  dark 
stress  which  is  shown  in  the  Revolution 
ary  poets  of  all  Europe,  and  even  in  the 
life,  though  not  the  works,  of  Cardinal 
Newman. 

The  whole  transcendental  movement, 
in  its  literary  record,  is  a  striking  in 
stance  of  that  absence  of  turbulence, 
of  desperate  battle,  and  deep  desire, 
in  our  literature,  which  has  been  em 
phasized  as  characteristic  in  our  men 
of  letters.  In  Hawthorne  only  is  there 
found  the  sense  of  spiritual  peril,  and  he 
presents  it  objectively  and  historically 
as  a  primary  experience  in  the  moral  life 
of  the  founders  of  New  England,  most 
significantly  in  The  Scarlet  Letter,  and 
197 


AMERICA    IN    LITERATURE 

again  less  dramatically  and  more  specu- 
latively  in  Donatello;  but  in  none  of  his 
work  is  it  a  religious  struggle, — it  is  a 
moral  catastrophe  that  he  illuminates. 
Hawthorne  is,  for  this  reason,  the  most 
profound  and  vitally  spiritual  in  his 
expression  of  human  experience,  the 
deepest  prober  of  the  breast,  of  all  our 
authors,  whether  poets  or  prose-writers ; 
and  he  comes  to  this  overmastering  in 
terest  in  sin,  rather  than  crime,  and  in 
the  operations  of  conscience  and  the  re 
covery  of  the  soul  through  suffering  and 
its  entrance  on  a  greater  life  thereby, 
because  of  his  American  inheritance  and 
environment,  his  American  genius. 

Bryant  is  a  fading  and  almost  Ossi- 
anic  figure,  a  wintry  ghost,  to  most  of 
us;  Emerson  and  Hawthorne,  a  figure  of 
light  and  a  figure  of  darkness,  are  the 
companion  spirits,  American  through 
198 


THE    ACHIEVEMENT 

and  through,  who  now  seem  the  greatest 
American  writers  of  the  last  century. 
Longfellow  and  Lowell,  associated  to 
gether  in  fame  as  in  life,  may  find,  the 
one  a  wider  acceptance,  the  other  an 
academic  vogue.  Longfellow's  poetry 
is  less  valued  now  by  the  critical  class, 
but  it  is  not  likely  that  his  hold  on  the 
homes  of  his  countrymen  has  lessened; 
the  critical  class  has  lost  in  the  sense  of 
refinement,  and  is  dull  to  the  quality  of 
Longfellow;  but  his  trust,  his  humanity, 
his  hospitality  to  the  joys  and  sorrows 
of  domestic  life,  his  tenderness,  his  con 
solation,  his  noble  nature,  his  just  taste 
in  what  to  say  and  what  to  leave  un 
said  about  the  crises  of  lives,  not  tragic, 
but  touched  with  human  things  that 
"have  been  and  may  be  again,"  his 
companionableness  for  souls  not  over- 
strenuous,  but  full  of  all  the  pieties  of 
199 


AMERICA    IN    LITERATURE 

life  endearing  life — these  things  give  him 
long  lease  of  fame;  and  within  his  un- 
emphatic  range  he  has  an  unsuspected 
variety,  and  thereby  expresses  without 
weariness,  except  to  the  life-jaded,  an 
American  nature  of  such  sweetness,  re 
finement,  and  purity  that  it  has  become 
almost  exemplary  of  an  ideal  of  the  lit 
erary  life  on  this  soil.  Lowell  has  not 
touched  his  people  -to  the  same  degree; 
he  is  over-intellectual  for  some,  and  has 
defects  of  taste  which  repulse  others,  and 
great  unevenness;  he  remains  our  only 
critic  of  the  first  rank,  but  in  other  re 
spects  his  fame  seems  a  doubtful  matter. 
To  these  names,  with  full  right,  that  of 
Poe  is  added  because  of  his  originality 
in  lyric  tone  and  motive,  and  its  power, 
now  long  demonstrated,  in  this  country 
and  abroad ;  and  also  because  of  the  pe 
culiar  horror  of  his  tales. 
200 


THE    ACHIEVEMENT 

No  other  name  would  be  suggested 
as  of  the  first  rank  in  our  literature, 
and  therefore  worthy  to  be  mentioned 
in  a  century's  achievement;  or  if  sug 
gested,  none  would  pass  unchallenged. 

The  works  of  standard  authors,  ac 
cepted  by  a  nation,  constitute  its  true 
achievement  in  literature;  but  in  so 
strict  a  definition  the  bulk  of  writing  in 
any  age  is  lost  sight  of,  and  the  sense  of 
i  real  performance  is  less  than  it  should 
be.  There  have  been  hundreds  of 
American  writers,  and  scores  of  them 
have  ,been  successful  novelists,  nature- 
writers,  humorists,  dramatists,  poets; 
and  in  a  more  minute  view  they  would 
be  seen  to  have  contributed  much 
that  would  deserve  recognition  in  a 
fuller  statement.  The  novelists  after 
Cooper  have  given  expression  to  many 
provincial  or  metropolitan  phases  of 
201 


AMERICA    IN    LITERATURE 

American  life,  that  serve  as  local  tran 
scripts  of  manners  and  places  and  stud 
ies  of  some  careers,  and  these  may  prove 
historically  interesting,  the  humorists 
have  caught  a  distinct  flavor  from  the 
time,  and  Mark  Twain  is  their  capital 
type  of  popular  celebrity;  and  so  the 
other  classes,  the  descnbers  of  nature,  of 
whom  Thoreau  is  the  leader,  the  senti 
mentalists  of  whom  Mitchell  is  the  most 
enduring,  and  the  others,  each  with  its 
head,  have  accomplished  success  in  their 
day  and  generation. 

In  the  fields  of  endeavor  that  neigh 
bor  literature,  in  history,  oratory,  state 
papers,  and  the  like,  distinction  has 
been  won  as  high  in  those  provinces  of 
expression  as  any  in  the  pure  literary 
art.  But  to  examine  our  literature  in 
this  comprehensive  way  in  order  to 
exhibit  our  true  performance  would 
202 


THE    ACHIEVEMENT 

be  as  vain  a  task  as  to  endeavor  to 
show  our  inventive  genius  by  a  cata 
logue  of  the  patent-office  instead  of  by 
those  supreme  examples  which  have  been 
gifts  to  all  the  world.  The  national  life, 
it  is  true,  has  found  expression  in  many 
authors  besides  those  of  genius,  and  in 
many  men  of  literary  faculty  approach 
ing  genius  —  its  moral  experience  in 
Whittier,  its  democratic  crudity  in 
Whitman,  its  later  culture  in  the  elder 
poets  still  living,  its  abolished  Southern 
civilization  in  Uncle  Tom's  Cabin,  its 
border  and  mining -camp  romance  in 
Bret  Harte ;  but  the  writers  in  these  cases 
belong  in  a  secondary  class  in  compari 
son  with  Bryant,  Irving,  Cooper,  Emer 
son,  Hawthorne,  Longfellow,  Lowell, 
and  Poe.  These  last  are  the  authors 
whom  the  nation  as  a  whole  regards  as 
its  great  writers  in  pure  literature,  and 
203 


AMERICA    IN   LITERATURE 

none  besides.  They  are  themselves  in  a 
second  class  in  comparison  with  the  Eng 
lish  or  French  authors  of  the  century; 
and,  in  fact,  they  fall,  in  almost  a  solid 
group,  just  below  the  greatest  names  in 
English  literature,  and  above  all  others 
who  are  reckoned  as  second  in  England, 
and  Emerson,  Hawthorne,  and  Poe  are 
unique  each  in  his  kind.  The  work  they 
and  those  associated  with  them  have 
done  has  been  distinguished  by  artistic 
conscientiousness,  to  a  degree  rarely 
paralleled,  and  also  by  purity ;  no  nation 
has  so  pure,  few  so  painstaking,  a  litera 
ture;  it  fails  of  the  highest  rank  only  be 
cause  it  lacks  inspiration,  passion,  that 
deep  stirring  of  the  spirit  of  man  which, 
with  all  its  cost,  is  the  cause  of  his  high 
est  reach  in  imagination,  intellect,  and 
desire. 


RESULTS  AND  CONDITIONS 

IN  the  survey  of  our  literature  from 
the  point  of  view  of  its  relations  to. 
the  country  at  large,  it  is  impossible  to 
escape  a  sense  of  fragmentariness  in  the 
products,  of  disproportion  between  the 
literary  energy  and  the  other  vital  powers 
of  the  people,  and  of  the  inadequacy  of 
literature  as  a  function  of  national  ex 
pression.  Its  geographical  distribution 
is  uneven,  and  reflects  the  movement  of 
population;  its  seat  has  been  mainly  in 
the  Northeast ;  in  power  of  interpretation 
of  social  life  it  had  depth  in  New  England 
only,  and  as  it  spread  southward  and 
205 


AMERICA    IN    LITERATURE 

westward  it  grew  in  superficiality.  Hu 
mor  alone  is  native  to  the  whole  country: 
and  hence,  perhaps,  Mark  Twain,  in  that 
sphere,  most  nearly  approaches  the  po 
sition  of  a  national  writer,  though  he  is 
characteristically  Western  in  his  origins 
and  his  mind,  as  Holmes,  much  more 
narrowly,  belongs  to  the  extreme  East, 
and  is  there  the  member  of  a  provincial 
caste.  But  there  has  been  no  national 
author  in  the  universal  sense;  no  man 
moulded  so  American  in  genius  as  to 
appeal  to  all  parts  equally,  and  to  ex 
press  the  common  nature  either  by  an 
intense  spiritual  concentration  or  by 
diverse  representation.  Our  literature 
is  rightly  described  as  a  sectional  prod 
uct,  in  a  stage  lying  beyond  its  original 
colonial  condition,  it  is  true,  but  not 
advanced  to  national  unity;  and  here 
again  it  reflects  the  fact  that  our  politi- 
206 


RESULTS  AND    CONDITIONS 

cal  union  preceded  that  community  of 
mental  and  moral  culture,  of  ideas,  be 
liefs,  purposes,  of  deep  decisions  and 
fundamental  agreements,  which  is  still, 
in  relation  to  the  whole  country,  partial 
and  approximate  only. 

The  clefts  in  the  nation  are  intellect 
ual  and  moral,  but  they  exist;  and  our 
literature,  in  its  history,  discloses  their 
direction  and  depth.  Its  absorption 
by  the  people  still  has  geographical  and 
racial  limitations,  not  to  be  overcome  in 
our  day  by  this  elder  group  of  writers. 
In  America  the  literary  historian  has  to 
deal  with  a  transplanted  civilization 
which  originally  allowed  widely  varying 
degrees  of  culture  both  in  the  different 
ranks  of  society  and  territorially;  the 
extent  of  the  country,  in  connection 
with  other  causes,  enabled  these  initial 
diversities  between  South  and  North, 
207 


AMERICA    IN    LITERATURE 

border  and  sea-coast,  to  resist  unification 
in  such  general  and  prevailing  homo 
geneity  as  really  subsisted  in  all.  Under 
these  conditions  it  was  inevitable  that 
our  literature  should  be  produced  in  local 
centres,  and  make  an  imperfect  appeal 
in  its  own  day,  and  be  taken  into  the 
common  consciousness  with  incomplete 
and  uneven  success  by  the  nation  in  its 
length  and  breadth.  It  is,  indeed, 
rather  by  this  formative  influence  in 
entering  into  national  life,  in  the  process 
of  time,  than  by  its  origin  out  of  such  a 
life  that  our  literature  becomes  broadly 
indigenous ;  but  it  is  hardly  to  be  thought 
that  the  exponents  of  old  New  England 
or  of  the  new  West — especially  in  view 
of  the  great  and  continuing  historic  rift 
in  principle,  sentiment,  and  memory 
which  separates  the  vSouth  from  a  free; 
participation  in  our  moral  and  imagina- 
208 


RESULTS   AND   CONDITIONS 

tive  life — will  become  national  even  with 
the  lapse  of  years.  Our  first  authors 
represent  an  historic  moment  of  great 
interest,  a  new  literary  beginning;  they 
express  the  mutually  excluding  social 
spheres  in  which  they  were  bred,  and 
taken  together  they  include  all  native 
imaginative  life  that  was  to  find  per 
manent  embodiment.  It  belonged  to  the 
environment  that,  in  so  far  as  they  were 
American,  they  should  be  sectional. 

It  was  also  inherent  in  the  conditions 
that  the  literary  continuers  of  a  trans 
planted  civilization  should  hark  back  to 
the  times  and  lands  of  its  origins  and 
home.  The  tie  of  paternity  is  stronger 
than  the  fraternal  bond,  and  nearer  of 
kin;  and  the  minds  of  our  writers  were 
more  at  ease  in  conversing  with  their  in 
tellectual  ancestors  than  with  their  fel 
low-citizens.  It  was  a  fortunate  inci- 
i4  209 


AMERICA    IN    LITERATURE 

dent  of  our  separation  from  the  mother- 
country  that  our  men  of  letters  natu 
rally  went  not  only  to  the  English  tradi 
tion  but  to  Continental  literatures  with 
more  freedom  and  directness ;  had  Long 
fellow  and  Emerson  been  born  in  Eng 
land  it  is  unlikely  that  the  one  would 
have  stamped  his  art  so  broadly  with 
the  Continent  or  the  other  have  so 
Orientalized  the  surface  of  his  thought. 
Intimate  as  was  the  English  inheritance, 
it  is,  nevertheless,  true  that  the  con 
scious  impact  of  the  past  on  our  literary 
men  was  largely  through  immediate 
contact  with  the  other  literatures  of 
Europe  as  they  had  been  moulded  by 
the  Renaissance,  the  Gothic  revival,  and 
the  Romantic  revolt ;  our  direct  obliga 
tion  to  Greek  and  Latin  was  slight  and 
is  negligible;  but  we  touched  the  broad 
stream  of  Occidental  culture,  in  the  first 
210 


RESULTS   AND   CONDITIONS 

half  of  the  last  century,  not  through 
England  only,  but  from  the  Baltic  to 
Lisbon  and  Shiraz. 

This  ancient  and  rich  literary  past  was 
the  source  of  our  artistic  tradition,  and 
the  sense  of  its  dignity  and  preciousness 
was  always  great  in  the  scholars  among 
our  writers,  and  nearly  all  of  them  were 
scholarly  men.  They  lived  habitually  in 
it, they  learned  from  it,  they  emulated  its 
works .  In  other  words ,  they  had  the  aca 
demic  mind.  They  were  but  partly  natu 
ralized  even  in  the  country  in  which  they 
were  born ;  they  were  sharers  in  the  cos 
mopolitanism  of  the  modern  world,  and 
it  was  forced  on  them  by  the  state  of 
American  culture.  They  were  citizens 
of  a  wide  world  of  letters;  even  in  their 
patriotic  endeavors  they  owned  and 
obeyed  another  allegiance  to  truth  and 
art,  to  the  republic  of  letters,  to  the  uni- 


211 


AMERICA   IN    LITERATURE 

versal  human  spirit;  and  this  was  their 
natural  lot  because  they  were  compelled 
to  seek  their  literary  inheritance  in  an 
age  before  American  letters  began  to  be. 
This  was,  for  them,  to  take  the  aca 
demic  point  of  view;  and  whether  they 
did  this  from  choice  or  under  the  com 
pulsion  of  circumstances,  the  limitation 
thus  imposed  on  them  is  often  thought 
of  as  disqualifying  their  Americanism. 
In  so  far  as  they  continued  the  literary 
tradition  in  its  original  shape,  as  if  it 
had  never  been  transplanted,  it  is  said 
that  they  were  not  of  the  pure,  native 
soil. 

The  academic  point  of  view  is  nothing 
more  than  an  ever-present  sense  of  the 
hand  of  the  past  in  literature — that  hand 
which,  through  the  whole  range  of  the 
vital  energies  of  society,  is  felt,  perhaps, 
at  first  as  compelling  and  restrictive, 
212 


RESULTS  AND    CONDITIONS 

but  at  last  as  salutary  and  saving,  for  it 
is  the  racial  will,  abiding  from  the  past  in 
us,  which  has  formed  not  only  our  bod 
ies  in  stature  and  favor,  but  the  habits 
of  the  soul  in  action.  The  literary  pow 
er  of  tradition  is  inherited,  half  in  our 
instincts  and  early  affections,  and  half  in 
our  books  of  counsel  and  example ;  the 
academic  mind  is  one  that  masters  this 
tradition  and  is  mastered  by  it,  and  has 
thus  become  a  race  -  mind  with  differ 
ent  degrees  of  fulness  and  faculty.  To 
know  the  past  of  artistic  power,  to  be 
imbued  with  its  moods  and  instructed 
in  its  methods,  to  become  familiarized 
with  its  great  works  in  the  human  spirit, 
and  to  bring  from  them  the  true  per 
spective  that  must  be  applied  to  the  re 
cent  and  rising  world  of  letters,  is  the 
highway  of  criticism;  so  it  has  been 
built  from  the  first.  Our  authors  in 

313 


AMERICA    IN    LITERATURE 

submitting  themselves  to  this  education 
in  the  literature  of  that  civilization  of 
which  America  is  but  a  forward  branch, 
neither  injured  their  genius  nor  lessened 
their  power.  They  were  on  the  road 
that  great  poets  have  always  followed. 
Who  can  think  they  would  have  been 
happier  had  they  chosen  to  forget  Uh- 
land  and  Dante,  Hafiz  and  Plotinus, 
Scott  and  Pope  and  Keats,  and  remem 
ber  only  the  Bay  Psalm-Book,  Edwards 
and  Franklin,  Freneau  and  Brown;  or, 
literature  apart,  to  look  only  on  the 
lilacs  in  the  door-yard,  and  the  wood- 
chopper,  the  fisherman  and  the  itinerant 
Yankee,  or  what  of  nobler  form — Monad- 
nock,  Washington  or  Decatur,  Massa- 
soit  or  Pontiac — there  might  be?  They 
did  not  slight  the  American  material  in 
their  age;  rather  they  clung  to  it  with 
unhappy  tenacity;  but  their  power  to 
214 


RESULTS    AND    CONDITIONS 

deal  with  it — and  this  is  a  more  impor 
tant  because  more  comprehensive  debt 
than  any  obligation  for  theme  or  atmos 
phere — they  obtained  from  their  educa 
tion  in  the  old  humanities.  Art  is  not 
self-made;  its  breeding  is  from  far-off 
ages  now;  it  is,  in  literature,  one  of  the 
oldest  possessions  of  the  race;  and  the 
poet  who  thinks  to  sing,  as  the  linnet 
sings,  by  the  mere  chipping  of  its  egg, 
will  have  a  linnet's  fame.  In  taking 
possession  of  all  the  literature  of  their 
civilization  that  they  could  get,  our 
early  authors,  so  far  from  finding  a  limi 
tation,  found  an  enfranchisement.  It 
is  true,  no  doubt,  that  in  this  they  passed 
beyond  the  native  culture  of  their  own 
country;  they  departed  from  what  was 
common  to  the  State;  and,  in  so  far, 
they  were  not  Americans  in  the  provin 
cial  sense. 

2I5 


AMERICA    IN    LITERATURE 

They  derived  from  their  academic 
education  the  artistic  point  of  view, 
This  characterized  them  and  differen 
tiated  them  from  their  countrymen  en 
gaged  in  quite  other  occupations.  The 
rawness  of  American  life  on  the  broad 
scale,  the  vulgarity  of  its  surface  of 
manners  and  the  fierceness  of  its  money- 
getting  exploitation  of  the  country — 
greater  probably  than  ever  afflicted  so 
large  a  territory  —  survive  perceptibly 
only  in  our  books  of  humor,  but  they 
were  very  real.  When  the  most  liberal 
allowance  has  been  made  for  caricature 
and  prejudice  and  a  bad  temper,  the 
observations  of  Mrs.  Trollope  and  Dick 
ens,  and  even  the  coarse  diatribe  of 
Moore,  are  blabbing  tales.  The  Hard- 
cider  Campaign  is  a  landmark  for  the 
first  irruption  of  Western  roughness,  like 
a  back-water  wash,  upon  the  more  staid 
216 


RESULTS   AND    CONDITIONS 

and  respectable  communities  of  the  East, 
where,  perhaps,  is  then  to  be  found  the 
ending  of  old  colonial  reverential  ways. 
But  without  drawing  into  memory  again 
the  things  in  which  national  oblivion 
delights,  it  is  plain  to  any  student  of 
our  social  history  that  these  men  of  let 
ters  lived  very  much  protected  lives, 
in  little  circles  of  their  own,  apart  from 
the  mass  of  their  fellow-citizens.  They 
were,  as  a  whole,  gentle-born  and  col 
lege-bred;  they  were  the  late  fruition 
of  a  slowly  matured  refinement  in  their 
separate  communities;  and  life  in  them 
had  come  to  that  perfection  where  the 
artistic  point  of  view  —  the  desire  for 
moral  order,  sensuous  beauty,  and  emo 
tional  harmony — was  natural,  and  the 
will  to  find  these  things,  to  create  them, 
effectual.  The  local  circles  in  which  they 
dwelt,  and  of  whose  members  they  were 
217 


AMERICA   IN    LITERATURE 

representative,  were  a  small  portion  of 
the  thriving  and  driving  American 
world. 

Artists  in  their  work,  however,  they 
were  determined  to  be.  They  were  very 
conscious  of  this  purpose,  and  they  ex 
hibit  something  that  may  be  called  the 
timidity  of  the  scholar,  a  feeling  of  the 
presence  of  the  model  and  of  the  eye 
of  the  master.  This  was  the  weak  point 
in  their  academic  dependence,  and  ac 
counts  for  the  plentiful  vein  of  imita- 
tiveness  that  belongs  to  all  young  litera 
tures  in  their  learning  times.  Some  of 
them  never  really  laid  aside  this  touch 
of  inferiority,  however  unreal  it  was  in 
fact.  In  Lowell,  who,  perhaps  more 
than  any  other,  was  so  abundant  in  fac 
ulty  and  power  that  he  makes  the  im 
pression  of  a  man  unequal  to  his  own 
genius,  there  is  felt  constantly  the  neigh- 
218 


RESULTS   AND  CONDITIONS 

borhood  of  a  stylist;  in  his  odes,  for  ex 
ample,  it  is  the  greater  neighborhood  of 
Dryden;  in  the  later  lyrics  it  is  the  small 
er  neighborhood  of  Dobson;  The  Biglow 
Papers,  on  the  other  hand,  is  the  notable 
instance  of  intrinsic  originality,  certain 
ty,  mastery;  yet  even  there  he  could  not 
get  along  without  his  prefaces.    Cooper  is 
the  pupil  of  Scott,  Irving  of  the  essay 
ists,  and  even  Emerson  is  not  without 
the  echo  of  seventeenth-century  short- 
rhymed  verse,  a  hard,  ringing  coinage 
not  easily  deceiving  the  ear.     Longfel 
low   acquired   foreign   poetic   manners, 
but  he  was  native  to  their  graces  and 
wore  them  as  his  own  rather  than  by 
adoption;  he  Americanized  all  that  he 
brought  home  either  from  travel  or  fire 
side  study.     Poe,  who  drew  his  talent  to 
the  dregs,  displayed  in  his  art  that  cold 
calculation  which  was  also  an  element  in 
219 


AMERICA   IN    LITERATURE 

his  life.  Hawthorne,  the  purest  artist 
of  all,  was  least  a  pupil  and  soonest  a 
master.  All,  in  their  different  ways  and 
degrees,  worked  out  an  artistic  method 
by  which  they  meant  to  represent,  to  in 
terpret,  and  to  unveil  the  human  spirit. 
They  were  concerned  not  with  the  ap 
parent,  but  the  real;  not  with  the  tran 
sitory,  but  the  eternal;  and,  excepting 
Poe,  they  were  all  artists  of  the  beauti 
ful. 

They  also  adopted ,  in  common ,  to  make 
a  third  definition,  the  romantic  point  of 
view;  and  if  by  their  cultivation  of  re 
fined  beauty  they  were  set  apart  from 
the  mass  of  their  countrymen,  it  might 
be  thought  that  they  intensified  this  re 
moteness  by  departing  as  far  from  Amer 
ican  actuality  as  the  spirit  of  romance 
could  convey  them.  They  obeyed  the 
compulsion  of  the  time.  Romanticism 
220 


RESULTS    AND  CONDITIONS 

ruled  the  literary  world  abroad.  Travel 
of  itself  is  always  a  main  source  of  ro 
mance.  It  is  the  realist  who  must  have 
a  home-keeping  mind,  in  order  to  ob 
tain  that  familiarity  with  the  life  he  de 
picts  which  is  required  for  truthfulness. 
The  romancer  is  free  of  all  the  world ;  if 
he  bides  in  his  native  village,  like  Tho- 
reau,  he  finds  Italy,  Egypt,  Siberia  there; 
if  he  strays  through  the  broad  world, 
the  marvel  of  nature,  the  ruin  of  history, 
the  passion  of  life  are  his  discoveries. 
Irving  in  the  Alhambra,  Longfellow  by 
the  belfry  of  Bruges,  Taylor  in  the  foot 
ways  of  Palestine  are  characteristic  fig 
ures;  to  their  instincts,  their  native  de 
ficiencies,  their  outgoing  spirits,  Europe, 
visible  and  in  history,  was  as  much  a 
realm  of  romance  as  the  forest  of  Brocel- 
liand  to  mediaeval  knighthood;  when 
they  returned  home  they  found  ro- 
221 


AMERICA    IN    LITERATURE 

mance  sitting  by  the  shores  of  the  New 
World. 

America  was  romantic  from  the  first. 
I  presume  it  is  with  others  as  with  my 
self;  classical  beauty  leaves  me  contem 
plative;  romantic  beauty  incites  me. 
The  spirit  of  life  in  America  is  an  in 
cited  spirit.  In  Hawthorne's  American 
themes  the  encircling  wilderness  of  Pu 
ritanism,  the  life  of  the  decaying  genera 
tion,  the  aspiration  of  the  reformers, 
were  romantic;  so  were  the  forest  of 
Cooper's  Pathfinder,  the  Hiawatha  year, 
and  the  idealizations  of  his  country 
that  Lowell  shaped  in  the  Washers  of 
the  Shroud  and  elsewhere.  In  atmos 
phere,  faith,  and  passion  alike,  romance 
has  been  our  genius;  it  continued  so  in 
Bret  Harte's  picturesqueness  and  Joa- 
quin  Miller's  arid  sublimity.  The  ro 
mantic  spirit  in  our  authors  was  fed,  too, 

322 


RESULTS   AND    CONDITIONS 

not  only  from  contemporary  literature — 
the  European  wave  of  the  time  —  but 
from  its  fountain-heads.  These  men 
went  to  the  great  works  of  the  race. 
They  translated  Homer,  Dante,  and 
Faust;  Longfellow  gathered  the  spoils 
of  the  saga  and  ballad,  and  Lowell  grew 
familiar  with  trouvere  and  troubadour. 
In  the  most  vivid  autobiographical  word 
he  ever  wrote,  he  said  of  this  experience: 

"  I  was  the  first  who  ever  burst 
Into  that  silent  sea." 

Emerson  appropriated,  as  best  he  could, 
Persian  image  and  atmosphere  through 
Von  Hammer.  History  sympathized 
with  them  in  Prescott  and  Motley.  To 
these  must  be  added  the  infusion  of 
German  philosophy  in  the  transcen- 
dentalists,  with  Hedge  as  their  centre 
of  learning,  not  without  satellites,  and 
223 


AMERICA    IN    LITERATURE 

the  re -birth  of  old  English  and  the 
ballads  which  Child  accomplished.  It 
is  simple  truth  to  say  that  the  litera 
tures  of  the  world  were  never  better 
known,  more  intelligently,  more  vari 
ously,  more  richly,  than  in  Cambridge 
at  that  time.  But  if  our  authors,  by  their 
foreign  contact  and  artistic  sense,  de 
parted  from  the  body  of  the  people,  on 
this  side  of  romantic  prepossession  they 
found  reunion  with  the  national  spirit; 
the  planting  of  the  colonies,  the  Revo 
lution,  and  the  war  for  the  Union  were 
romantic  causes;  the  freeing  of  the  ne 
groes  and  the  experiments  of  socialistic 
reorganization,  that  everywhere  in  one 
or  another  form  dotted  the  land,  were 
romantic  dreams.  If  there  was  any 
solvent  that  could  have  fused  these  men 
with  their  country,  it  was  romantic  art; 
here  they  were  at  one  with  the  people, 
224 


RESULTS    AND   CONDITIONS 

as  in  their  culture  and  their  artistic 
ripening  they  were  in  advance  of  the 
common  life. 

Such  are  some  of  the  causes  of  the 
lack  of  correspondence  between  our 
earlier  literature  and  American  life,  in 
its  sectional  and  foreign  aspects  and  in 
its  artistic  quality.  The  aloofness  that 
their  work  takes  on,  when  viewed  in  re 
lation  to  the  whole  country,  either  in  its 
own  period  or  now,  is  very  tangibly  felt, 
and  it  increases  in  proportion  as  the 
work  rises  in  the  scale  of  art,  thought, 
and  culture,  in  Poe,  Hawthorne,  Emer 
son,  Lowell,  Irving.  In  the  case  of  these 
men  the  habitancy  of  their  minds  was  in 
the  past  of  literature,  the  abstract  moral 
or  aesthetic  sphere,  the  glamor  of  for 
eign  horizons;  they  knew  America  as  a 
part,  but  not  the  whole,  of  life ;  they  were 
all  sons  of  an  older  civilization,  keenly 
is  225 


AMERICA    IN    LITERATURE 

conscious  of  an  earlier  home,  and  even 
in  their  late  age  still  planters  of  the 
mind  in  a  new  world.     In  consequence 
of  this,  they  appealed  broadly,  at  best, 
to  but  one  strain  of  the  founding  blood. 
It  is  not  surprising,  under  such  cir 
cumstances,   that   they   should   rapidly 
grow  old-fashioned.     They  are,  in  fact, 
farther  off  from  our  growing  youth  than 
would  readily  be  conceived;  they  are 
less   near   than   their   English   contem 
poraries,    for    example.     The    tradition 
which  they  accepted  and  emulated  was 
necessarily  in  them  a  second-hand  affair, 
and  not  only  were  they,  to  this  extent,  be 
lated  Goldsmiths,  Scotts,  Keatses,  Dry- 
dens,  and  Dantes,  but  their  Americanism 
itself,  in  so  far  as  they  consciously  sought 
it  in  topic,  was  a  matter  of  the  now  re 
mote  past,  of  the  colonies,  the  Indians, 
the    border,    of   things    and   conditions 
226 


RESULTS    AND   CONDITIONS 

whose  picture  and  sentiment  are  now 
historical;  and,  in  the  graver  and  the 
aesthetic  sphere,  the  transcendentalism 
of  Emerson,  the  sentimentality  of  Poe, 
the  balladry  of  Longfellow — who  lived 
in  the  age  of  Uhland — the  classicism  of 
Lowell,  the  rusticity  of  Whittier,  the 
boarding-house  of  the  Autocrat,  are  far- 
off  things.  The  speed  with  which  these 
authors,  in  the  mass  of  their  work,  retire 
into  quiescence  while  their  acceptance 
becomes  conventional,  is  not  an  illusion; 
the  change  goes  on  apace.  Their  repu 
tations,  gained  enormously  by  the  fewness 
of  the  band.  If  one  swallow  does  not 
make  a  summer,  yet  he  is  listened  to 
more  than  many  swallows.  If  these  au 
thors  were  not  our  own,  and  if  they  were 
not,  furthermore,  all  of  our  own,  would 
there  be  so  many  books  written  about 
them,  I  wonder?  To  me  they  still  seem 
227 


AMERICA    IN    LITERATURE 

a  troop  of  pilgrims,  taking  up  their  sing 
ing  march  in  our  springtide  and  morn- 
tide,  but  much  apart  in  their  May-mak 
ing,  psalm  -  singing,  and  story  -  telling ; 
they  recede  more  and  more  from  life. 
There  is  something  pathetic  in  their  ar 
tistic  loneliness  in  their  own  time,  some 
thing  more  pathetic  in  their  fading 
away  in  ours;  for  their  age  is  gone,  as 
truly  as  Saadi's  and  Walther  von  der 
Vogelweide's. 

The  absorption  of  our  literature  by 
the  people,  nevertheless,  has  been  re 
markable,  in  proportion  to  its  intrinsic 
worth.  Epic  and  drama,  the  two  great 
est  literary  forms,  have  been  absent 
from  it;  so,  too,  has  love-passion,  while 
satire  and  elegy  have  been  slightly  rep 
resented.  In  prose,  the  range  of  character 
has  been  narrow,  the  element  of  plot 
inconspicuous,  and  the  most  consistent 
228 


RESULTS  AND    CONDITIONS 

and  varied  success  has  been  achieved  in 
the  short  story,  sketch,  and  tale.  The 
themes  have  been  domestic  life,  religious 
feeling,  public  causes — in  which  are  to  be 
included  all  pieces  of  a  patriotic  motive — 
and  that  phase  of  history  which  may  be 
described  as  the  legend  of  our  origin  in 
all  parts  of  the  country.  The  nearness 
of  these  topics  to  the  people  governs  its 
appropriation  of  the  work,  in  varying 
degrees;  and  the  simple,  spontaneous, 
direct  style  of  the  writing,  which  is  also 
the  people's  style,  is  a  controlling  factor 
in  getting  acceptance  for  the  work.  In 
the  style  is  to  be  found  the  most  char 
acteristic  national  trait;  the  themes  of 
the  affections  and  of  religion  belong  to 
universal  human  life;  local  color,  historic 
substance,  and  the  passion  of  loyalty  to 
our  ideas  and  institutions  are  national 
elements. 

229 


AMERICA    IN    LITERATURE 

Our  literature,  so  absorbed,  has  been 
effectual  within  the  natural  limits  of 
its  appeal.  Its  path  in  the  land  has 
been  identical  with  the  path  of  the 
power  of  civilization  and  the  mastering 
national  force;  it  has  been  less  accepted 
in  the  South,  which  is  antipathetic  to 
the  national  spirit  and  genius,  and  it  is 
less  readily  received  by  the  foreign  ele 
ments  in  the  population,  though  large 
portions  of  these  have  been  prepared  for 
sympathy  and  understanding  in  regard 
to  it  by  being  imbued  with  Revolutionary 
hope.  In  spite  of  all  deductions,  it  has 
done  its  work  as  a  leaven  and  power  in 
the  nation,  and  will  long  continue  to 
operate  in  a  diminishing  degree.  The  ex 
tent  to  which  Emerson,  for  example, 
who  was  the  most  purely  American  of 
all,  has  entered  into  national  life  by  sus 
taining  independence,  self-reliance,  and 
230 


RESULTS   AND    CONDITIONS 

perfect  courage  in  freedom  of  opinion, 
which  most  constitute  the  American 
way  of  behavior,  is  incalculable,  while, 
at  the  same  time,  he  has  nourished  ideal 
ity  of  aim  and  the  conviction  of  a  divine 
meaning  in  the  world  which  are  also 
broadly  characteristic  of  the  free  Amer 
ican  temper.  The  power  of  our  litera 
ture  falls  within  the  limits  of  the  idea  of 
democracy,  but  that  idea  it  has  com 
panioned  through  the  century;  it  has  re 
mained  close  to  the  common  life,  the 
common  religion,  the  fortunes  of  the 
common  people  in  the  State,  and  has 
thrown  over  the  State  historical  romance 
and  inspirited  it  with  ideal  purpose  for 
humane  ends.  Our  past  is  contained  in 
it. 

In    the    historical    field,    where    the 
American  material  and  color  of  'our  ro 
mance  are  most  plain,  the  past,  of  ne- 
231 


AMERICA    IN    LITERATURE 

cessity,  either  perishes  or  is  preserved 
for  the  people  in  the  forms  of  imagina 
tion  furnished  by  its  writers,  and  these 
forms  as  now  fixed  are  not  likely  to  be 
changed  or  much  modified  by  later  au 
thors  who  may  recur  to  the  subject. 
Colonial,  Indian,  and  border  life  have 
become  largely  literary,  and  are  seen 
through  literature,  rather  than  actual, 
seen  through  history;  the  record,  it  is 
true,  is  accessible  to  the  scholar,  but  for 
the  people  imagination  serves,  as  it  is  in 
Hiawatha,  Arthur  Dimmesdale,  Leath- 
erstockings,  and  Roaring  Camp.  The 
Dutchman,  the  Puritan,  and  the  pio 
neer  have  found  imperfect  types,  an 
incomplete,  and  largely  legendary  in 
terpretation,  but  such  it  is. 

In  the  ethical  field  a  similar  prominence 
belongs  to  those  ideas  of  democracy  which 
have  been  most  influential  in  working 
232 


RESULTS  AND    CONDITIONS 

out  the  political  and  moral  faith  of  the 
nation  and  which  appear  in  the  poetry 
of  Lowell,  Emerson,  and  Whittier  espe 
cially.     If  the  nation  be  regarded  in  its 
diversity  and  extent,  it  may  be  ques 
tioned  whether  the  welcome  given  to 
these  ideas,  great  as  it  is,  has  been  so  wide 
spread  as  to  entitle  it  to  be  called  na 
tional;  but  if  the  nation  be  regarded  in 
its  unity  and  core  of  life,  and  in  its  his 
toric  efficiency,  a  different  answer  may 
be  given,   for  this  welcome  has  come 
from  the  ruling  and  dominant  class,  from 
that  part  of  the  people  which  has  led  in 
making  history   and  spreading  institu 
tions   on  those   same   principles  which 
gave  the  nation  birth.     It  seems  unlike 
ly  that  this  intense  and  elevated  strain, 
which  belongs  characteristically  to  New 
England  poets,  appeals  in  the  way  litera 
ture  ought  to  appeal— that  is,  sympa- 
233 


AMERICA   IN   LITERATURE 

thetically  and  spontaneously — to  many 
Americans  not  of  the  original  stock  of 
the  North,  except  the  English  emigrants 
of  this  century,  and  their  children,  who 
were  of  a  similar  breed.  The  number  of 
such  descendants  of  the  first  colonists  is 
many  millions,  and  they  belt  the  North 
across  the  Continent;  but  they  are  only 
a  portion  of  the  whole  people.  Certain 
ly  the  readers,  who  find  their  own  un 
conscious  being  expressed  in  the  ideas 
of  these  poets,  are  fewer  than  those  who 
absorb  without  difficulty  the  literary 
interpretation  of  our  history. 

In  connection  with  this,  it  is  necessary 
to  take  account  of  the  vast  accretions  of 
our  population  from  foreign  lands,  of  a 
different  ancestry  and  language  from 
the  race  which  founded  the  nation  and 
established  the  genius  of  the  English 
language  and  of  English  institutions  as 
234 


RESULTS  AND    CONDITIONS 

the  original  spring  and  the  necessary 
fountain  of  its  continuing  life,  at  least 
for  our  own  ages.  Citizens  of  German 
extraction,  for  example,  depend,  even  in 
the  second  generation  to  some  degree, 
upon  their  own  native  books,  on  Goethe 
and  Schiller,  and  their  many  minor  com 
patriots,  for  the  sentiment  and  ideas 
that  flow  from  literature.  Such  books 
have  no  life  in  the  soil  except  to  supply 
the  mould  of  the  spirit  for  those  who 
have  not  been  made  completely  English 
in  language  and  American  in  tempera 
ment;  no  foreign  book  of  literary  rank 
has  been  produced  here  from  such 
sources.  Whether  the  assimilation  of 
American  ideas  goes  on  in  the  younger 
generations  with  anything  like  the 
same  certainty  and  penetration  as 
the  appropriation  of  American  his 
tory  and  institutional  life,  may  well 
335 


AMERICA    IN    LITERATURE 

be  considered  a  doubtful  matter.  The 
truth  is  —  and  here  is  one  reason  for 
the  apparent  disproportion  between 
our  literary  energy  and  our  other  vital 
powers  —  that  the  function  of  litera 
ture  is  only  partly  discharged  by  our 
native  writers.  The  situation  is  not  un 
like  that  spoken  of  as  existing  in  the 
Puritan  colony,  where  the  Bible  took 
the  place  of  all  other  literature  as  an  in 
strument  of  self-expression  for  the  soul 
that  used  it  in  both  the  intellectual  and 
the  emotional  or  moral  life.  Not  only 
have  our  foreign  strains  a  special  litera 
ture,  adapted  to  their  habits  and  tem 
peraments,  and  also  dear  to  their  affec 
tions,  which  lingers  on,  but  the  great 
English-sprung  mass  of  the  people  have 
the  literature  of  England,  which  makes 
a  racial  appeal  to  them,  and  is  of  per 
manent  interest.  Dickens  and  Thack- 
236 


RESULTS   AND   CONDITIONS 

eray,  Tennyson  and  Browning,  to  speak 
of  the  last  age,  and  Scott,  Wordsworth, 
and  Burns  in  the  preceding  time,  not  to 
mention  such  perennial  powers  as  Shake 
speare  and  Milton,  discharge  the  function 
of  literature  for  us  far  more  effectually, 
with  greater  vividness  and  diversity 
than  our  own  writers  can  accomplish. 
What  the  Bible  was  to  the  Puritans 
—the  Book  of  Life  —  that  English 
literature  is  to  us  still;  and  to  it  all 
American  writing  is  essentially  supple 
mentary.  The  place  of  literature  in  our 
national  life,  as  a  great  function  of  ex 
pression,  is  not  measured  either  by  our 
own  production  or  our  appreciation 
of  it;  but  spreads  deeply  and  diverse 
ly  in  the  uses  made  of  the  historic  lit 
eratures  of  the  world,  primary  among 
which  for  us  are  the  Hebrew  and  the 
English. 

237 


AMERICA    IN    LITERATURE 

The  absorption  of  our  literature  by 
nations  abroad  also  offers  some  indi 
cations  of  its  native  characteristics. 
France,  from  which  we  have  received 
least  in  formative  power,  has  derived 
most  from  us.  Cooper  fell  in  with  the 
taste  for  romantic  naturalism  there  in 
his  day,  and  Poe  appealed  to  something 
racial  in  the  Gallic  spirit  by  virtue  of 
which  he  found  not  only  acceptance,  but 
imitation;  Hawthorne  also,  though  to  a 
far  less  degree,  was  made  welcome.  In 
Germany  there  was  much  the  same  for 
tune  for  Cooper — there  seems  to  be  a 
special  affinity  in  the  German  race  for 
the  forest  —  and  their  own  romantic 
schools  had  prepared  the  way  for  Poe 
and  Hawthorne,  while  they  added  Long 
fellow  to  the  favored  number.  The 
countries  to  the  north  and  south  show  no 
special  trait  in  their  receptivity,  and  in 


RESULTS   AND  CONDITIONS 

general  our  authors  entered  the  Con 
tinent,  as  they  did  England,  through 
their  power  in  the  universal  human 
spirit  rather  than  by  local  qualities  in 
their  work. 

In  England,  nevertheless,  these  last 
counted  in  a  peculiar  way;  it  was  natural 
that  our  authors  should  desire  to  appear 
to  the  manner  born  and  without  pro 
vincial  traits;  but,  on  the  other  hand,  it 
was  also  natural  that  Englishmen  should 
desire  to  see  in  their  trans-Atlantic  kin 
something,  whatever  it  might  be,  that 
constituted  native  and  peculiar  charac 
ter.  Our  authors  sought  to  conform  to 
the  common  type  of  English  genius; 
Englishmen,  on  the  contrary,  sought 
the  variation.  English  judgment  fre 
quently  persisted  in  identifying  the 
American  genius  by  its  exceptional  in 
stances  ;  and  in  Bret  Harte  and  Joaquin 
239 


AMERICA    IN    LITERATURE 

Miller,  and  especially  in  Mark  Twain  and 
the  humorists  generally,  and  in  Walt 
Whitman  among  our  poets,  was  found 
the  new  American  type.  It  was  felt 
that  our  polite  literature,  as  it  appeared 
in  those  half-dozen  names  which  have 
shimmered  all  along  these  pages  like  a 
little  string  of  pearls,  told  over  and  over, 
was  not  characteristic  but  a  continua 
tion  of  the  old  tradition,  an  English  litera 
ture  transplanted  to  a  new  soil,  and  there 
thriving  in  so  ancestral  a  way  as  scarcely 
to  show  the  change ;  rather  in  these  later 
writers  and  these  unfamiliar  forms  was 
the  emergence  of  the  new  breed  of  men. 
Native  judgment  has  not  coincided  with 
this  view. 

Walt  Whitman,  to  take  the  typical 
case,  is    an    idealist  —  all    live    Ameri 
cans  are  idealists  —  and  he  exemplifies 
in    literature,    in    a    highly    developed 
240 


RESULTS    AND   CONDITIONS 

form,  that  variety  of  the  American 
idealist  who  is  a  believer  in  ideas,  usu 
ally  in  one  idea  which  he  seizes,  and  is 
thereupon  possessed,  and  often  trans 
ported  even  to  living  in  a  fanatical 
world.  Walt  Whitman  was  one  of  these. 
The  appealing  thing  in  him  is  the  pure 
primitiveness  of  the  ideas  he  seized ;  the 
arresting  thing — to  neglect  what  is  mere 
ly  grotesque  :n  his  work — is  the  boldness 
of  outline  and  a  certain  uncramped 
strength  with  which  he  presented  these 
ideas  of  nature,  fraternity,  and  toil. 
The  ideas  themselves  are  as  fundamental 
in  the  social  world  as  are  the  ideas  of  the 
Declaration  of  Independence.  In  their 
acceptance  abroad  as  a  peculiarly  Amer 
ican  expression  there  was  an  element  of 
preconception;  such  primitiveness,  so 
loud  an  emphasis,  such  a  careless  defi 
ance  of  conventions  of  art  and  speech, 
16  241 


AMERICA    IN    LITERATURE 

belonged  to  a  democracy — it  was  as 
Shakespeare  might  have  portrayed  it; 
but  to  the  minds  who  accepted  Whit 
man,  the  democrat  was  still  a  cousin  to 
Caliban.  Whitman  had  natural  poetic 
force  without  art;  when  he  forgot  his 
camerado  role  as  the  democrat  vagabond 
under  whose  sombrero  was  all  America, 
he  wrote  a  few  fine  lyrics ;  but  to  foreign 
ers,  who  find  in  him  the  nationality  they 
miss  in  the  old  group,  the  result  must  be 
disappointingly  small  as  the  type  and 
outcome  of  three  centuries  of  slowly 
culminating  English  toil  in  a  great  land ; 
and  to  us  at  home,  gazing  half  humor 
ously  on,  when  we  take  time  to  think 
of  it  with  a  moment's  passing  serious 
ness,  it  seems  only  the  caricature  that 
deforms  truth.  So  Dor£  might  have 
drawn  us,  so  Rabelais  have  humorized 
us;  extravagance  of  line  and  laughter 
242 


RESULTS   AND   CONDITIONS 

could  go  no  further.  To  become  what 
Whitman  was,  Americans,  who,  more 
than  Englishmen,  are  the  heirs  of  all 
Europe,  must  first  denude  themselves 
of  that  larger  civilization  with  which 
they  are  integral,  and  be  an  Ishmael 
among  nations.  A  poet  in  whom  a 
whole  nation  declines  to  find  its  like 
ness  cannot  be  regarded  as  representa 
tive,  though  he  may  smack  strongly  of 
some  raw  earth  in  the  great  domain. 
It  is  more  reasonable  to  find  the  na 
tional  literary  genius,  as  a  fellow  of 
universal  art  with  its  peers,  in  the 
appropriation  of  our  best  by  foreign 
nations  in  those  authors  that  are  now 
classical  with  us,  the  group  in  whom 
we  find,  as  a  nation,  our  past,  our 
ideals,  and  our  daily  life  of  home  and 
heaven. 

The  literature  which  has  been  treated 
243 


AMERICA    IN    LITERATURE 

here  flowered  in  the  first  half  of  the  last 
century,  and,  except  in  the  late  West 
ern  blossom,  was  beyond  its  prime  at 
the  opening  of  the  civil  war,  in  1860. 
The  complete  failure  of  this  literature 
to  establish  an  American  tradition — 
none  of  its  authors  left  any  successor 
in  the  same  line — indicates  something 
parasitical  in  it,  as  if  it  were  not  self  fed; 
a  literature  fed  from  European  culture 
we  have  had,  but  it  does  not  perpetu 
ate  itself  in  an  American  culture;  and 
in  the  change  of  conditions,  appar 
ently,  it  is  only  from  a  new  growth 
that  literature  may  now  be  anticipated. 
There  is  one  striking  sign  that  the  elder 
literature  has  retreated  into  the  past. 
While  it  flourished,  it  had  influence 
upon  that  large  mass  of  writing  which 
may  be  called  secondary  literature,  by 
which  is  meant  the  product  that  arises 
244 


RESULTS   AND   CONDITIONS 

from  the  practical  use  of  literature  as 
a  social  instrument — always  the  larger 
part  in  any  age,  whether  in  sermon, 
journal,  or  magazine.  Now  the  in 
fluence  runs  rather  the  other  way,  and 
journalism  and  its  cognate  forms  affect 
the  higher  modes  of  literature  by  en 
forcing  upon  it  something  of  its  own 
conditions,  standards,  and  uses.  Not 
to  enter  in  detail  upon  that  period  of 
dubious  fame  which  fills  the  last  quarter 
of  the  century,  it  is  plain,  for  example, 
that  the  literary  treatment  of  history, 
so  admirable  in  our  historians  of  the 
older  time,  came  to  its  end  in  Parkman, 
the  friend  and  mate  of  the  Cambridge 
group  in  its  age.  The  period  in  ques 
tion  has  been  filled  with  fiction,  largely 
from  French  models,  both  realistic  and 
romantic,  with  poetry  in  which  Tenny 
son,  Rossetti,  and,  among  older  writers, 
245 


AMERICA    IN   LITERATURE 

Herrick  have  been  the  prevailing  foreign 
types,  and  with  no  significant  prose 
other  than  fiction.  The  high  average 
excellence  of  this  work  has,  nevertheless, 
failed  to  secure  for  its  authors  the  in 
dividual  eminence  and  national  welcome 
that  belonged  to  the  older  time.  The 
touch  of  literature  on  the  public  has 
been  mainly,  almost  exclusively,  through 
magazines,  which  have  determined  both 
its  objects  of  interest  and  its  moulds  of 
expression,  leading  to  a  predominance 
of  the  brief  and  the  impressionable  in 
kind,  and  of  the  versatile  in  talent.  The 
singleness  of  aim  characteristic  of  Haw 
thorne,  Emerson,  and  Longfellow  is 
not  found;  neither  is  the  element  of 
race  or  of  academic  tradition  conspic 
uous. 

From  another  point  of  view,  the  cleav 
age  which  is  thus  denoted  in  many  ways 
246 


RESULTS    AND    CONDITIONS 

between  the  old  and  the  present,  while 
it  sets  the  writers  of  the  last  age  apart, 
indicates  a  closer  welding  of  the  literary 
spirit  with  the  nation,  a  more  perfect 
union  of  the  people  and  their  writers. 
This  is  plain  in  the  realistic  and  roman 
tic  fiction  of  the  latest  time,  and  here 
and  there  in  some  lonely  strain  of  verse. 
It   does   not   seem,   however,   that   our 
writers  feel  the  sustaining  strength  of 
national  life  supporting  them   in   any 
thing  like  the  same  degree  that  the  old 
group  felt  the  power  of  the  local  cult 
ures    of  which    they   were    the    climax 
and  expression.     What  our  old  litera 
ture  lacked,  after  all,  was  power;  it  is 
this  deficiency  that   makes   it   at  best 
only  a  minor  literature,  in  comparison 
with  the  literatures  of  the  large  world. 
The  nation  was  not  back  of  it ;  only  parts 
and  fragments  of  the  nation.     The  same 
247 


AMERICA    IN    LITERATURE 

lack  of  power  continues.  Timidity  was 
a  characteristic  of  those  authors,  as  has 
been  said,  with  but  one  or  two  excep 
tions;  and  this  timidity  also  lasts,  and  is 
shown  in  the  rarity  of  really  great  ambi 
tion  or  important  tasks ;  we  are  too  con 
tent  to  feed  the  presses  merely.  Imita- 
tiveness,  too,  has  reached  its  limits; 
there  is  hardly  an  author  of  English 
fame,  not  to  speak  of  the  Continent  also, 
from  whom  our  men  of  letters,  great  and 
small,  have  not  borrowed,  sooner  or 
later,  in  theme,  style,  and  temperament, 
till  sometimes  it  seems  as  if  American 
literature  were  a  whispering  gallery  of 
the  Muses,  and  little  more;  in  this  ex 
haustion  of  the  secondary  method  of  the 
academic  tradition,  we  may  come  back 
at  last  to  our  natural  voices  and  find  our 
selves  after  the  necessary  period  of  ap 
prenticeship  in  our  art,  as  English  poets, 
243 


RESULTS   AND   CONDITIONS 

who  had  greatness  in  them,  also  did. 
To  be  an  echo  of  contemporary  London 
would  be  too  despicable  a  fate.  It  is 
rather  for  us  to  return  to  the  old  group 
for  such  lessons  as  they  can  afford  us  in 
their  devotion  to  the  greatest  masters  of 
all  the  world,  in  their  single-minded  and 
high-aimed  art,  and  in  their  interpreta 
tion  of  national  ideals,  and,  relying  on 
this  larger  and  more  composite  people 
with  whom  we  are  more  closely  blended 
and  fused,  to  endeavor  to  give  noble  ex 
pression  to  the  common  life  and  the 
lofty  hope,  the  breadth  and  lift  of  the 
people,  and  again  to  bring  from  a  de 
mocracy,  enriched  with  all  the  cultures 
of  the  past  and  the  blood  of  all  races,  the 
flower  of  art. 

To  sum  up,  then,  the  characteristics 
that  have  been  made  prominent  here, 
our  past  literature  is  in  the  main  sec- 
249 


AMERICA    IN    LITERATURE 

tional,  a  blossom  from  the  stock  of  old 
or  young  communities  in  the  East  and 
distant  West,  and  deeply  indebted  to  its 
historic  localities  for  theme,  atmosphere, 
and  cast  of  mind;  it  also,  in  its  most  im 
aginative  phases,  enters  into  the  com 
mon  life  of  the  human  spirit,  lives  in  the 
domain  of  universal  art,  and  finds  a  wel 
come  in  all  Occidental  nations  as  intelli 
gent  and  warm  as  is  ever  vouchsafed  to 
literature  out  of  its  own  country ;  and  it 
has  achieved  this  high  distinction  be 
cause  of  its  frank  use  of  the  tradition  of 
literature  in  all  Western  civilization. 
It  has  been  controlled  by  the  academic, 
artistic,  and  romantic  spirit.  For  our 
own  people  it  has  determined  for  all  time 
the  memory  of  our  historical  dawn  in 
the  wilderness,  its  coloring  and  charac 
ter,  and  has  preserved  the  moral  and 
political  ideals  of  that  portion  of  the 
250 


RESULTS   AND   CONDITIONS 

people  in  whom  lay  the  shaping  will  of 
the  nation  from  the  formation  to  the 
preservation  of  the  Union ;  whatever  the 
future  may  have  in  store,  our  ideal  past, 
supplemented  for  a  time  by  history,  will 
subsist  in  the  national  consciousness  as 
it  is  expressed  in  these  authors.     Much 
of  the  life  of  the  nation  in  its  various 
divisions  found  no  record,  and  has  per 
ished.     This   literature   seems,   and   is, 
inadequate;  it  bears  no  fit  proportion 
to  the  greatness  of   the  nation  which 
swiftly  ourgrows  it.     On  the  other  hand, 
it  is  supplemented  in  the  life  which  it 
so  partially  feeds   by  world-literature, 
and  in  overwhelming  measure  by  the 
English,    of    which    we    are    heirs    of 
time.     In    this    fact    of    our    national 
life — an(i  perhaps  in  the  practice  of  our 
authors   also — may  be  found  the  fore 
shadowing  of  a  time  when  the  effect- 


AMERICA    IN    LITERATURE 

ual  literature  of  the  race  shall  be  in  a 
larger  measure  a  world-literature.  Spe 
cial  cultures  arise — Judaea,  Athens,  Rome, 
Italian,  English,  French,  German — and 
mingle  with  currents  from  above  and 
under,  and  with  crossing  circles  in  the 
present ;  and  the  best  that  man  has  found 
in  any  quarter,  nationalized  in  many  peo 
ples,  takes  the  race  and  shapes  it  to  itself 
after  its  own  image,  and  especially  with 
power  in  those  who  live  the  soul's  life,  till 
the  world  shall  be  knit  into  one;  such  a 
providence  seems  to  reside  in  history. 
That  is  a  far  hope — the  Christian  dream. 
But  now  in  our  own  time,  and  in  this 
halt  of  our  literary  genius,  it  is  plain  that 
our  nobler  literature,  with  its  little  West 
ern  after-glow,  belonged  to  an  heredity 
and  environment  and  a  spirit  of  local 
culture  whose  place,  in  the  East,  was 
before  the  great  passion  of  the  Civil  War, 
252 


RESULTS    AND    CONDITIONS 

and,  in  the  West,  has  also  passed  away. 
It  all  lies  a  generation,  and  more,  behind 
us.  The  field  is  open,  and  calls  loudly 
for  new  champions. 


THE   END 


14  DAY  USE 

RETURN  TO  DESK  FROM  WHICH  BORROWED 

LOAN  DEPT. 

This  book  is  due  on  the  last  date  stamped  below,  or 

on  the  date  to  which  renewed. 
Renewed  books  are  subject  to  immediate  recall. 


REC'D  L.D 


MOV  20  1957 


MAY  g  6  I960 


FEBZ3  ic 


IN  STACKS 


DEC    2  1959 


REC'D  LD 


DEC  II  1953 


LD  21A-50m-8,'57 
(C8481slO)476B 


General  Library 

University  of  California 

Berkeley 


D      MtO/O 


